Two people report now this problem, while this works fine at our lab. So I'm puzzled right now.

I attach two screenshots from the device manager and the Command Line interface. Can you compare it with what you see? Which is the firmware version of your evaluaiton board?

Stefan

I cannot find the EVAL board using drscl version 5.06 while the drsosc works fine. I tried 2 different eval boards and 2 different computers and the same effect. I looked under device manager at the libusb and the drs4 was there, and checked the driver which was found to be up to date.

This is indeed currently not implemented. But there is a simple C program drs_exam.cpp, which connects to a board and safes some data. You could modify that program to your needs.

Stefan

Hi everyone,

I wonder if there is a way to pass parameters to drscl. What I specifically want to do is calling drscl from a shell script and read/save some data. I want to schedule a measurement. Therefore I need to call drscl from the command line using some parameters.

It would look something like this;

#!/bin/bash

for i in {0..100}

  do

    echo "Reading $i"

    ./drscl read 0 0 test.xml

    sleep 1

done

This doesn't work of course. drscl won't take arguments from the command line. Can you suggest a way to do this please?

Thank you.

Not inside the board. Each channel has a single discriminator. You can select to trigger on a rising or falling edge, but you don't have two levels. What you can do however is to make an external trigger, like using old NIM logic. You can make discrimaiton with different levels and use a coincidence unit to combine them. Then feed the trigger into the external trigger input of the evaluation board (5V TTL level, not NIM level!).

Stefan

In the evaluation board we use an ADCMP601 comparator, which has a setup and hold time of 4.6 ns. So a pulse which exceeds the threshold for less than 4.6 ns will not trigger the board. If you AND two signals together, an additional constraint might apply on the coincidence pulse. This is processed in the FPGA, but once it becomes too short, it won't trigger the board as well. I never made a real measurement of that, but I would not be suprised if the coicidence signal (output of AND), needs to be at least 4-5 ns wide.

If you need more refined trigger conditions, make yourself an old-fashioned external trigger (with NIM modules for example), stretch the output to 10 ns and feed it into the external trigger input of the DRS4 board (5V CMOS logic, not NIM!).

Best,

Stefan

 Dear Stefan,

I have 2 identical pulses as a splittet signal with an amplitude of 300mV. Range is -0.5-0.5V, 5.12GSamp using the Evaluation-Board. Both signals are triggered in AND logic. One of the signals is delayed by a fixed value of 1-50ns for testing. On increasing the trigger Level from 10% to 50% of amplitude (pulse rise time is 2.5ns) pulses cannot anymore triggered above 4-5ns delay. It means there is a proportionality between the trigger level and the available range where 2 signals can be triggered in AND logic (Time-difference between 2 pulses). Do I anything misunderstand or is the time the comparator needs by higher trigger Levels for comparation longer than the 200ns at 5.12GSamp?

Board was timing and voltage calibrated before.

Thx

Danny

Can you try that executable under XP: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j1n09afhbmh0zzu/drsosc.exe?dl=0

The error probably comes from the fact that the drsosc.exe application is a 64-bit application and cannot be executed under XP any more. Unfortunately XP is forbidden at our institute for security reasons, so I have no machine around where I could compile the executable fro XP. Another problem is the libusb library used by drsosc.exe. Not sure if there is a XP version available any more. Have a look yourself at http://www.libusb.org/wiki/windows_backend 

I only see two possibilities for you: 1) Try to compile the program under Windows XP yourself, either with MS Visual Studio or with MinGW (http://www.mingw.org/). 2) Set up a virtual machine on your PC (for example with Virtualbox), and install either a newer version of Windows or a Linux distribution. The Linux excutable can then be compiled directly from sources as written in the documentation.

Stefan

Hi all

I have a problem with running the DRSOSC under windows XP SP3. We have some hardware which is not supported under newer versions of windows and we would like to use DRS boards along it, therefore we would higly appreciated any help in that direction. We have installed the software (V 5.03) to two different XP machines and got the same problem. The driver installs without any problem, but when the drsosc is run the system says " drsosc.exe is not a valid Win32 application". We have developed our own API for our software which also doesn't recognize the board. It says on the www page that it has been tested for windows XP, but I would appreciate if you can verify it? With best regards and thanks...

Hello Stefan,

Many thanks for the explanations. You've cleared my confusion in this matter.  

Abhishek Rajput

No, I can't think of anything else. There is no intermediate addressing stage. The only thing which sometimes happens is that the QFN76 package is not soldered correctly. If you don't have this under control, some pins might have a bad contact. You can check this by touching with a oscilloscope probe not the PCB pads but really the pins from the side, which is a bit tricky.

Stefan

Thanks for replying Stefan.

I was more so just concerned with the steps in the firmware when I had asked. However, yes the ROFS (1.05V) and O-OFS (0.9 V was 1.3 V earlier but, changed this becasue of ADC input requirements) are per spec, the VDD voltages are all there and input voltages are within the rails and finally the RSLOAD  (16 ns) too is ok. Looking at your eval board firmware , on appearance it looks exactly like what I am doing. I thought maybe I was/ still am missing some intermediate addressing stage. What I wrote earlier is what I still have.

Uhh, there are 1000 things which might be wrong. A bit like "my car is not working, it makes strange noise". Without having a look under the hood, there is just some wild guessing:

- Is your ROFS input at the right value? Your O-OFS?

- All VDD voltages there? Input voltage outside the rails?

- Your RSLOAD pulse long enough (>10ns)

- What happens if you put a really big sinal at the input, like 100 MHz sine wave with 2V p-p

The easiest is to have a look at the evaluation board and copy your new board like 1:1, also copy the VHDL readout code. Much easier that to start from scratch.

Stefan

I am having a general problem getting read back using the ROI mode.  In the transparent mode everything looks good. These are the steps that I take:

1) configure register (b"11111111",addr = "1100")

2) configure write shift register (b"11111111", addr = "1101")

3)  assert DENABLE and DWRITE

4) wait for trigger

5) on trigger deassert DWRITE

6) Strobe RSRLOAD

7)Set drs4 address to enable all channels (address = "1001")

8)give n SRCLK pulses

9) goto 3 and repeat.

Am I missing something? Everything looks straight forward based on the manual yet in the readout mode I only get noise. I do get the stop position on SROUT and the refclk is at 475 KHz as desired and I get the desired behaviour  for DTAP toggling at the same frequency as refclk.

You cannot measure times longer than 1024/sampling rate.

Stefan

The inverter chain in the DRS4 is continously running in a ring. Once you get a trigger, it is stopped. This happens in any of the 1024 cells. The last cell which sampled a signal plus ne is called "trigger cell". In the previous diagram in event #1, the last cell sampling was "1", so the trigger cell is "2". In event 2 (red case), the trigger cell is 5. If you would run like this, you see only the part of the waveform BEFORE your trigger (since the DRS4 is continously sampling and is stopped with the trigger). In order to see the full peak of your waveform, you can apply some external trigger to shift the trigger position to the right. This is done in the FPGA reading out the DRS4 chip. If your peak is let's say 20 ns wide, and you delay your trigger by 30 ns, you see the peak plus 10 ns right of the peak.

Stefan

Hello Stefan,

Thank you for the excellent explanation and diagram. This part of the code is now much clearer to me.

My other questions pertain to the "trigger cell". Firstly, what precisely does this mean? Moreover, how does the "trigger cell" relate to the trigger time delay we can set in the DRS4 application? This is causing some confusion for me, because regardless of where you set the trigger time delay on the DRS4 application, there are still points on the waveform that are saved prior to the moment in time when a pulse exceeds some voltage threshold we set in the application. I get the impression that "trigger delay" and "trigger cell" are unrelated concepts, so any clarification you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Abhishek

for (ch=0 ; ch<5 ; ch++) {
         i = fread(hdr, sizeof(hdr), 1, f);
         if (i < 1)
            break;
         if (hdr[0] != 'C') {
            // event header found
            fseek(f, -4, SEEK_CUR);
            break;      
         }
         chn_index = hdr[3] - '0' - 1;
         fread(voltage, sizeof(short), 1024, f);
         
         for (i=0 ; i<1024 ; i++) {
            // convert data to volts
            waveform[chn_index][i] = (voltage[i] / 65536. - 0.5);
            
            // calculate time for this cell
            for (j=0,time[chn_index][i]=0 ; j<i ; j++)
              time[chn_index][i] += bin_width[chn_index][(j+eh.trigger_cell) % 1024];            
         }
      }
    
      // align cell #0 of all channels
      t1 = time[0][(1024-eh.trigger_cell) % 1024];
      for (ch=1 ; ch<4 ; ch++) {
         t2 = time[ch][(1024-eh.trigger_cell) % 1024];
         dt = t1 - t2;
         for (i=0 ; i<1024 ; i++)
            time[ch][i] += dt;
      }

I don't believe I fully understand how the timing works between multiple channels on DRS4 board, even after reading the manual, but I am hoping to measure a time difference between two channels longer than 1024/sampling rate. So far, I have written a program in Matlab to extract timing and voltage information from the binary file to find the time difference between two channels that are set with the AND trigger logic and appear within approximately 80 ns of each other at a sampling rate of 1 GSPS. This works as intended, but I would now like to try to measure time differences of anywhere between 50 ns and several ms within a single spectrum. Since this is out of the range of only 1024 channels above 1GSPS, is it possible for the board to keep track of the time between two trigger pulses that occur at time differences longer than 1024/sampling rate?

Thank you very much for your help, and if I am severely misunderstanding how the board works, please forgive my ignorance and feel free to correct me,

~Randall

Edit: I forgot to mention that I am collecting the data using the provided DRS4 Oscilloscope software.