High Voltage Control Applications

CAEN SY 1527 based High Voltage Control

CAEN SY x527 EPICS Driver from Canadian Light Source

We sent an e-mail to Ru Igarashi asking him for his EPICS driver for SYx527 CAEN HV chassis. He sent us a tar ball with what he currently had, plus a User's Guide. It is not clear how much effort Ru will be putting into this project. He says that:

• It is not a full implementation of the available controls, lacking crate-wide and board-wide control.
• I haven't had time to eliminate a bug that causes the controls to lose communication with the crate

It is also apparent that some of the functionalities that were implemented need improvements, some of the parameters are hardcoded in the source files. So, if we want to use this driver, we will need to evaluate it, identify the problems, fixed them and add more control features. like board and crate-wide functions.

We took Ru's tar-file and adopted his source code and his EPICS database to our current EPICS scheme. We also used his EDM screens to evaluate the driver for the first time (automatic conversion to BOY OPI failed). The driver connected to our test SY1527 chassis and the EPICS records seemed to work. On driver initialization we get a lot of messages

 CAENHVGetCHParamProp(): Param Not Found (22)

but otherwise the application seems to work fine at the first glance.

Both the EPICS support and the application adjusted for our framework has been checked in into Hall D SVN repository. The applications, the database configuration with the Makefile will need a lot of modification. The example application was loading just a single board in one DB file using MSI EPICS extension for template substitutions.

CAN-bus-based Controls of the FCAL PMT bases

CAN-bus Hardware Configuration

AnaGate CAN quattro module

This is a CAN-bus to Ethernet bridge that Indiana University chose to use to control the bases via Ethernet. Matt is buying all these modules for us.

Here are the steps to set up an AnaGate module:

1. Obtain an IP address for the module based on the MAC address which is provided on the bottom of the device.
2. Plug in into a small local switch, and also connect a computer to that switch using a local static IP address configuration. AnaGate module is factory-configured in static IP mode as (192.168.1.254, 255.255.255.0, 192.168.1.1) .
3. Start a browser on the computer and navigate to the AnaGate module's web server at 192.168.1.254 and configure it for DHCP by checking the IPSetttings->DHCP check-box and save the setting.
4. The DHCP-based network configuration should be complete at this point and the device should show up on the JLab's network. Note that you will need to reset your computer to the same subnet as the AnaGate device and reset the power to the the small switch if you want to keep both device on that switch.