SPIDER Testbeam meeting 14/07/2009

Present   J. Wilson (Birmingham), P. Dauncey (Imperial), 
 J.J. Velthuis, D. Cussans (Bristol), G. Zhang, J. Crooks, M. Stanitzki (RAL),  R. Gao (Oxford)

Minutes: Marcel

Marcel updated everyone on the budget situation he said, budget is in place 
and the universities should receive letters from STFC soon. Jaap asked about 
budget codes, Marcel will follow this up.
ACTION Marcel: Arrange Budget codes 
Dave cussans plans to fly out to CERN to set things up there and test the 
setup, before he disappears on vacation, probably (Sunday till Wednesday). We 
need to figure out how to get stuff from RAL to Bristol, so they could continue 
testing. 
ACTION Marcel,Dave: Find a courier to Bristol
Dave said things are working more or less, but need some polishing, the buffer 
size is very large, 1000 frames are being buffered. this might cause problems 
with EUDET, because they'll have to to buffer that amount aswell. Rob Halsall 
is working on it. Also there are still some clock sync problems, that will 
need addressing. Jamie raised the question whether this will be using Allan 
code, since he thinks, there are some bugs in the x/y decoding. He'll 
suggested to check out Fortis with a laser pointer to see whether there 
problem persists.
ACTION Jamie: Provide an inputfile taken at RAL to test this.
ACTION Bristol: Do the laser pointer test. 
Dave mentioned, that he'll be taking out a 3TB array from Bristol to store the 
Fortis Data, so we have a local copy. Allegedly, they'll also be copied to 
somewhere on the GriD.
For TPAC we have a bunch of 500 GB disks lying on the shelves, which we could 
use. We can also use the storage array at RAL which has 20 TB available for 
this. (Update should be now visible web-wide). Paul was asking if we could get 
the EUDET triggers into the TPAC DAQ, Dave will circulate a TLU manual and 
also put a link on the webpage. The connection uses Rj-45 connectors, so the 
USBDAQ will need an adapter. Rui urgently needs the USBDAQ board to make 
progress
ACTION Dave: Sent it via DHL to Rui.
Imperial will make the USBDAQ cables (3 sets) and also will take care of the 
special cables for the PMT inputs.the PMt board is coming along and the 
engineer at B'ham is checking it out. Sensors are being potted and we decided 
to only pot the bonds as much as possible. Paul would like to record the 
Beam-Gate signal as well, so we could only write events to disk which have 
beam data. The monitoring code should monitor this as well. 
Dave will investigate where the cables are located and how we feed them in the 
USBDAQ, while he is at CERN.
ACTION Dave: Check Beam signals at CERN
Rui got the original firmware compiled and he now knows, where the problem 
lies (different software versions basically) He'll get working on the clock 
fan-out and the PMT and Beam-Gate in pulses. Matt will help out and send a 
stripped-down version to Rui done int he same software version, so this should 
avoid these funny problems. 
Next week we'll try to assemble things in B'ham. Paul will leave after that 
week for vacation, so it is important, that we sit down before on how to setup 
the DAQ.


Next meeting 28th of July, 1100