Monitoring Controls System meeting on October 14, 2003


Attendance:
Daniele De Pedis, Steve Hahn, Andy Hocker, Dan Ryan, Yeongdae Shon, Irina Shreyber, Margherita Vittone, John Yoh, JC Yun

NEWS:
The beam will back on by Nov. 17. We plan to resume normal iFix operation a couple of weeks before the date.

SYSTEM:
Mark finished up all the security patch works. No virus were found. He also made the disk images of the snap shots of each nodes. Vnode1 will not be upgraded since the computer is quite new. However, since Vnode1 has problem of stretched pictures while Vnode2 is working fine, we hope Mark can clone Vnode1 from Vnode2.

PLUG:
The PC brought from Italy is running fine with the upgraded iFix software. Once a CAEN fan failed and subsequently fixed. Now we have trouble in bringing the CAEN back.

CLC:
We can not upgrade the computer until we find a PCI controller.

PISABOX:
The Xenon flasher code was originally compiled at MUON3. Since we upgraded the PISABOX system, we need to recompile it again at MUON3. Yeongdae will give a hand for this.

MUON Scintillator:
Oleg is writing code to make an excutable to replace the old code running on the interpreter, which is known to be very slow.

MUON:
Mark installed the NI-DAQ cards into the MUON3 according to Phil's request. This will provide TTL level signals for software Trigger Inhibit. Yeongdae said that suddenly the global variable changed without any reason. He was informed that the global variables and pictures in the server are downloaded on every Sunday.

Trigger Inhibit:
Jonathan is planning to install a special auxiliary card in the trigger room for the Trigger Inhibit. The NIM hardwares in the counting room will be removed later.

Jonathan's amendment to the minutes:

The new system has 160 channels.  We use the Yale return cross point
with a custom transition module.  The system is now cabled up and is
being tested.  There is still some work to do on software.  There is one
input for each of the HV trip signals (e.g. one for each of the 12 SY527
crates) and one for each of the ifix or PC signals.  64 of the channels
  are opto-isolated and will be used for components in the hall.

The control room display will show the individual component that
tripped--the LED panel will be retired.  All control will be from the
new display, and we will retire the IFIX page when everything is working
with beam.  One thing that detector experts need to address is that for
the SY527 systems, I'd like the signal returned from the HV crates to be
true (+5V) if the system is ready for HEP.  I'm hoping to have the
system up and running in a week or two.

PSM:
Dervin tested all of the COT crates. Dan Ryan will be off for a week. He can be reached through his cell phone.

ICICLE:
Margherita said we are now recording the setting values of the Plug HV in addition to the read out values in database. This is Luciana's request.

TOF:
Daniele said he is having problems since the PCI controller is not compatible with the TOF visual basic code. According to Yeongdae the code should work since the visual basic is written in C++ code. However, Daniele said there are some codes written in nonstandard ways and causing the problems.