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ID Date Authordown Subject
  252   Tue May 21 18:30:11 2013 Enrico Contimac osx 10.6
> > > 
> > > it looks like 64bit vs 32bit problem, you have to compile all libraries for the same architecture. Maybe, make clean to 
> > > remove all precompiled object files .o and recompile it again. Try to compile first that simple example without wxWidgets.
> > > 
> > > Martin
> > 
> > 
> > Good point, but all libraries are already compiled to 32 bits, since the laptop is running at 32 bits. Unless you mean that I
> > have to convert to 64 bits, but this means to change all content of the PC, and I don't want to do this. Can the applications
> > run with 32 bits or do they need 64 ? 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Enrico
> 


> There is no specific reason to run it on 64 bits, 

Good.

> so just all libraries have to match, that's all. But the original Makefile has been written for 64 bits, so it might need some 
> adjustments.

Ok, but I don't understand where is the point to correct. 64 bits do not appear explicitally (at least to me, who am not a drake of programming ...) 
neither in the Makefile neither in the (few) source files I have examined.

Thanks again,
Enrico
  253   Fri May 24 17:58:07 2013 Enrico Contimac osx 10.6
> > > 
> > > it looks like 64bit vs 32bit problem, you have to compile all libraries for the same architecture. Maybe, make clean to 
> > > remove all precompiled object files .o and recompile it again. Try to compile first that simple example without wxWidgets.
> > > 
> > > Martin
> > 
> > 
> > Good point, but all libraries are already compiled to 32 bits, since the laptop is running at 32 bits. Unless you mean that I
> > have to convert to 64 bits, but this means to change all content of the PC, and I don't want to do this. Can the applications
> > run with 32 bits or do they need 64 ? 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Enrico
> 
> There is no specific reason to run it on 64 bits, so just all libraries have to match, that's all. But the original Makefile has been written for 64 bits, so it might need some 
> adjustments.
> 
> /Stefan

Hi Stefan,
   I made some progress. Understood what was wrong in the make phase. You have only to add the option -arch i386 in the CFLAGS line of the makefile.
Then the make is ok, it produces the 3 executables. drs_exam and drscl seem to work correctly. 
DRSOsc.app does not work as app, in the sense that if you click it, an error message comes saying "You can't use this version of the application DRSOsc.app with 
this version of Mac OS X. You have Mac OSX 10.6.8. The application requires Mac OS X 10.7 or later. "
If you execute drsosc from the terminal, the graphical window pops up, the waveform is displayed, but you don't have access to the graphical interface, no button works, you can't do
anything. To quit the app, you have to kill it from the terminal with the kill command.
But anyway is a progress with respect to yestarday.
Any idea/suggestion to overcome the above problems ? I thought it is a problem with the graphical library (xwWidgets) but I have checked it, it's ok, I have also reinstalled it
(release 2.8.12_3) but nothing changed.

PS. the chip test output (done with the drscl ) is the following (see below). Is it normal or what ? THANKS.

B0> ct
Press 'q' to quit, any other key to repeat test.

Max. frequency is 5.1 GHz
Cell error on channel 1, cell 5: -137.6 mV instead 0 mV
Chip Error!

Max. frequency is 5.1 GHz
Cell error on channel 1, cell 5: -129.4 mV instead 0 mV
Chip Error!
  255   Sat May 25 12:45:46 2013 Enrico Contimac osx 10.6
> > I made some progress. Understood what was wrong in the make phase. You have only to add the option -arch i386 in the CFLAGS line of the makefile.
> > Then the make is ok, it produces the 3 executables. drs_exam and drscl seem to work correctly. 
> > DRSOsc.app does not work as app, in the sense that if you click it, an error message comes saying "You can't use this version of the application DRSOsc.app with 
> > this version of Mac OS X. You have Mac OSX 10.6.8. The application requires Mac OS X 10.7 or later. "
> > If you execute drsosc from the terminal, the graphical window pops up, the waveform is displayed, but you don't have access to the graphical interface, no button works, you can't do
> > anything. To quit the app, you have to kill it from the terminal with the kill command.
> 
> To run an executable as an app, you have to put it into a certain directory structure. The Makefile has the target "make app" which exactly does that. It executes following code:
> 
> DRSOsc.app: drsosc
>         -mkdir DRSOsc.app
>         -mkdir DRSOsc.app/Contents
>         -mkdir DRSOsc.app/Contents/MacOS
>         -mkdir DRSOsc.app/Contents/Resources
>         -mkdir DRSOsc.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj
>         echo 'APPL????' > DRSOsc.app/Contents/PkgInfo
>         cp drsosc.xcodeproj/Info-processed.plist DRSOsc.app/Contents/Info.plist
>         cp drsosc DRSOsc.app/Contents/MacOS/DRSOsc
>         cp drsosc.xcodeproj/DRSOsc.icns DRSOsc.app/Contents/Resources
> 
> You can also do this manually. You will then see the subdirectly DRSOsc.app actually as an App icon (you don't see it as a subdirectory in the Finder).  That's the way Apple has chosen to do this.
> 
> The chip test facility has been made for a certain test board we use for chip testing. It has a feature that is not present in the evaluation board. I have to disable that command there.
> 
> Best regards,
> Stefan

Hi Stefan,
yes, the makefile has already the recipe to create the app. For OSX 10.6 a obvious modification must be done in the info.plist file. Then everything goes right. Now I have the DRSOsc application
running on my mac with 10.6.
Thanks for the help.
Best regards,
Enrico
  797   Tue Sep 22 17:45:26 2020 Elmer GrundemanExternal triggering

Dear all,

I had a question about timing jitter and external triggering.

I trigger the board externally with a 3V pulse from a DG645 delay generator and as a test I use the gated charge function to integrate another pulse of the DG which goes into channel 1 (the timing jitter between different outputs of the DG is on the order of ~25 picoseconds).

The issue I’m encountering is that the signal on channel 1 is jittering in time with ~1 ns, which means the signal is jittering with respect to my integration gate (point A and B). If I look at the data it always starts at t = 0.000 but my signal (pulse) moves around in time.

If I don’t use the external trigger but trigger on channel 1 directly the signal does not move with respect to the gate, but I can see the start and end of the trace move in time. If I look at the data the first data point is not at t = 0.000 but some other time, which jitters with ~1 ns.

I did repeat the voltage and timing calibration, but that did not help either.

Do you know where this jitter comes from and if I can get rid of it?

Best regards,

 

Elmer

  799   Wed Oct 7 11:17:52 2020 Elmer GrundemanExternal triggering

I will try that, thanks!

Stefan Ritt wrote:

The trigger is there only to trigger the chip, but cannot be used as a precise time reference. If you want to measure precise timing, do this always BETWEEN two inputs, never between an input and the trigger. You might want to split and delay your trigger signal and feed one copy to another input of the evaluation board as your reference.

Stefan

Elmer Grundeman wrote:

Dear all,

I had a question about timing jitter and external triggering.

I trigger the board externally with a 3V pulse from a DG645 delay generator and as a test I use the gated charge function to integrate another pulse of the DG which goes into channel 1 (the timing jitter between different outputs of the DG is on the order of ~25 picoseconds).

The issue I’m encountering is that the signal on channel 1 is jittering in time with ~1 ns, which means the signal is jittering with respect to my integration gate (point A and B). If I look at the data it always starts at t = 0.000 but my signal (pulse) moves around in time.

If I don’t use the external trigger but trigger on channel 1 directly the signal does not move with respect to the gate, but I can see the start and end of the trace move in time. If I look at the data the first data point is not at t = 0.000 but some other time, which jitters with ~1 ns.

I did repeat the voltage and timing calibration, but that did not help either.

Do you know where this jitter comes from and if I can get rid of it?

Best regards,

 

Elmer

 

 

  348   Tue May 27 13:46:18 2014 Dominik NeiseSpikes in DRS4 data on custom baord.

We see quite some spikes in our DRS4 sampled data in FACT.  We see different types of spikes:

  • single cell spikes, usually showing a large amplitude of 200mV
  • double cell spikes, usually only in the order of 20mV.
  • Even triple and quadro cell spikes are rarely seen.

The double cell spikes often occur as symmetrical double cell spikes mirrored at cell 512. quadro cell spikes seem to be nothing else, than connected symmetrical double cell spikes. For the triple cell spikes we have no idea.
Currently we use simple filters to get rid of these spikes, this workes rather well for the large single cell spikes, but with the occurance of tripples and quadros we started to worry about higher multiples and revived our DRS4 spike investigations.

Now I was told, that you Stefan know already where these spikes come from and even a paper exisits. Unfortunately so far I was unable to find it.
I wonder if it is possible to predict the occurance of these spikes, so one does not have to search for them anymore and can get rid of the filters.

Best regards

Dominik

  484   Fri Mar 11 19:50:18 2016 Dominik Neise 

Hello Stefan,

I just stumbled again over a phrase in the DRS4 datasheet I never really understood, but didn't find the time to ask.

On page 8 it says: "An internal circuit ensures that the write signal is always 16 cells wide."

So when I look at a single channel, do I understand correctly, that at any given time during sampling, always 16 cells are open, i.e. 16 cells are connected to the analog inputs? So when the domino frequency is e.g. 5GHz then each cell sees the analog input not for 200ps but for 3.2ns correct?

  526   Wed Jun 1 22:29:01 2016 Dominik Neiseproblems when stop cell >= 767 ??

Hello Stefan,

some colleages told me a story, I was neither able to confirm nor find anything in the datsheet about. According to them:

For some internal reason of the DRS4, if the “stop capacitor” of the DRS4 is >= 767, the true stop channel is one before the stop channel read from the DRS4. In other words, the stop channel which returns the DRS4 shifts after sampling to the capacitor ID 766.

Can you confirm that, or even say a few words about that matter?

I wanted to confirm this by plotting the stop cell distribution for random triggered data, taken with one of the FACT boards. I assumed (possibly misunderstanding the matter), that this would lead to missing values in the area of stop cell 767, but cannot see any significant excess or lack of entries in that area.

 

Attachment 1: stop_cell_distribution.png
stop_cell_distribution.png
  479   Mon Feb 29 12:58:17 2016 Dmitry Philippovbaseline shift

Hello! My name is Dmitry. I am from SiPM Lab is NRNU MEPhI (Russia, Moscow). We bought DRS4 evaluation board V5 with firmware 21305. We use 5.0.4 build 21911 2015-11-23 software version (and before that we used 5.0.3 build 21508, 2014-10-15) with Windows 7 32bit.

We observe some strange behaviour. When we save waveforms (in xml or binary data) we see that some of them have the baseline shifted of about -5 mV.

The first picture (pic1) is 1000 waveforms which were glued in one. It is clearly see that baseline quite often has the shift.

The same effect can be seen without saving (writting): rarely when we use normal or auto trigger mode (pic3), and always in single trigger mode (pic2).

The images are attached.

Do you have any idea how it can be fixed?

 

Thanks, Dmitry.

 

Attachment 1: pic1.png
pic1.png
Attachment 2: pic2.png
pic2.png
Attachment 3: pic3.png
pic3.png
  223   Thu Feb 28 10:47:14 2013 Dmitry Hitsclock and trigger outs
Hi,
I am considering using the DRS4 evaluation board as an ADC card for the wire chamber in the physics lab (VP) experiment at ETH. However, the wire 
chamber has 8 outputs, so I would need to have two of such boards. Is it possible to synchronise them, online or offline? From the website, it looks 
like yes, but the documentation says that these features (trigger and clock out) may not have been implemented in firmware yet. Could you tell me 
the status?

Thank you very much,

Dmitry.
  234   Mon Apr 8 18:11:02 2013 Dmitry Hitsbinary to root

 Hi,

 

Does anyone has a program that converts a binary file from drsosc  output to a ROOT tree format?

 

Thank you,

 

Dmitry.

  271   Tue Jul 9 11:40:00 2013 Dmitry Hitscannot save in binary format

Hi,

I would like to save the waveform in a binary format. When I click Save then change format from xml to dat in the menu. I still get xml format but with dat extension.

what I am missing?

Thank you,

Dmitry.

 

  273   Tue Jul 9 14:00:49 2013 Dmitry Hitscannot save in binary format

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Dmitry Hits wrote:

Hi,

I would like to save the waveform in a binary format. When I click Save then change format from xml to dat in the menu. I still get xml format but with dat extension.

what I am missing?

Thank you,

Dmitry.

Version 4.0.1 has a problem there. Please use 4.0.0. If you can compile the program yourself, just change this line:

--- DOFrame.cpp (revision 20656)
+++ DOFrame.cpp (revision 20655)
@@ -517,7 +517,7 @@
       if (!filename.empty()) {
          m_btSave->SetLabel(_T("Close"));
          m_btSave->SetToolTip(_T("Stop saving waveforms"));
-         if (filename.Find(_T(".")) != wxNOT_FOUND) {
+         if (filename.Find(_T(".xml")) != wxNOT_FOUND) {
             m_WFfd = 0;
             m_WFFile = mxml_open_file(filename.char_str());
             if (m_WFFile)

 

 Thanks that fixed it!

Dmitry

  299   Wed Nov 6 11:53:28 2013 Dmitry Hitsflickering screen for drsosc

Hi,

 

I have install drs software on ASUS EeeBox with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. When I try to use ./drsosc the oscilloscope window flickers. Can you suggest what might be the problem?

 

Here is some more info:

******************************************************

System:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Memory: 992.9 MiB

CPU: Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.6GHz x 2

32 Bit

Disc: 156.5 GB

***************************************

Software:

Due to version Ubuntu I had to install the wxWidgets from source (wxWidgets with x11)

 

Thank you,

 

Dmitry.

  304   Mon Nov 18 11:20:15 2013 Dmitry Hitsflickering screen for drsosc

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Dmitry Hits wrote:

Hi,

 

I have install drs software on ASUS EeeBox with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. When I try to use ./drsosc the oscilloscope window flickers. Can you suggest what might be the problem?

 

Here is some more info:

******************************************************

System:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Memory: 992.9 MiB

CPU: Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.6GHz x 2

32 Bit

Disc: 156.5 GB

***************************************

Software:

Due to version Ubuntu I had to install the wxWidgets from source (wxWidgets with x11)

 

Thank you,

 

Dmitry.

This problem is new. Even on a slower Raspberry Pi we did not see any flickering. Have you tried a different version of wxWidgets? 

yes the problem was in wxWidgets, I have downgraded the ubuntu version and installed packaged version of wxWidgets. Now it works without problems.

Thank you,

Dmitry. 

  305   Mon Nov 18 15:49:01 2013 Dmitry Hitssynchronisation of readouts of two boards for offline analysis

 Dear Stefan,

I am trying to synchronise the readout of two test boards, one is the DRS4 test board, the other is PSI46 test board (used for the readout of  CMS pixel chip) for the offline analysis. I think that the most secure way to accomplish this is to pass a trigger number from one test board to the other.

The PSI46 test board has a software which allows it to accept a 16 bit number following the trigger pulse. I was wondering whether it would be possible for DRS4 board to generate such a trigger number on the trigger out line after sending the trigger. Also would it be possible to record this trigger number for every event stored by DRS4 board?

If none of this possible or requires a lot of time, then as a minimum, would it be possible to send-through only the triggers that were recorded by the DRS4 board?

Please let me know if you have better idea how to do this.

Thank you very much,

Dmitry.

  313   Tue Nov 26 15:36:39 2013 Dmitry Hitsreducing sampling speed

Dear Stefan

Is there an easy way to reduce sampling speed below 0.7 GSPS? I would like to record traces up to 5 usec long.

Thank you

Dmitry 

  317   Fri Dec 13 10:37:18 2013 Dmitry Hitsinput protection in DRS4 evaluation board

 Dear Stefan

Last month I was using a DRS4 evaluation board to digitise the signal from the charged particles in piM1 beam line at PSI. The beam in piM1 is a mixture of pions with a small percentage of protons. Pions are close to minimum ionising and were producing the signals on the order of 250 mV (Landau distributed). The protons at this momentum (250 MeV) are not minimum ionising  and produced much higher signals ( I could not exactly measure them because they were of scale for the DRS4 board). The pulses were on the order of 0.5 usec long. At low rate (~1kHz) the board was able to handle them, but when I turned the rate of particles to about ~300 kHz, the channel went flat. My question is whether the evaluation board has some type of input protection that would be possible to replace? Or does that mean that I have burned the input of the DRS4 board itself? Other channels behaving normal.

Thank you

Dmitry. 

  319   Mon Dec 16 11:09:25 2013 Dmitry Hitssynchronisation of readouts of two boards for offline analysis

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Dmitry Hits wrote:

 Dear Stefan,

I am trying to synchronise the readout of two test boards, one is the DRS4 test board, the other is PSI46 test board (used for the readout of  CMS pixel chip) for the offline analysis. I think that the most secure way to accomplish this is to pass a trigger number from one test board to the other.

The PSI46 test board has a software which allows it to accept a 16 bit number following the trigger pulse. I was wondering whether it would be possible for DRS4 board to generate such a trigger number on the trigger out line after sending the trigger. Also would it be possible to record this trigger number for every event stored by DRS4 board?

If none of this possible or requires a lot of time, then as a minimum, would it be possible to send-through only the triggers that were recorded by the DRS4 board?

Please let me know if you have better idea how to do this.

Thank you very much,

Dmitry.

There are indeed several methods. You can output the trigger number at the DRS evaluation board via the trigger output, but you would have to implement this yourself in the firmware.

The send-though of recorded triggers is already implemented in the board, so you could use that. The only thing to make sure is to to readout and re-enable the PSI46 board before you readout the DRS4 board. If you would first read the DRS4 board, and re-enable the DRS4 board via StartDomino(), then there could be the next trigger going through to the PSI46 board without that board being ready. So the sequence is

- connect trigger out of DRS4 to PSI46

- arm PSI46 board

- arm DRS4 board

- wait for trigger by calling IsBusy()

- read out PSI46 board

- read out DRS4 board

- call StartDomino(), which re-enables also the trigger though

 

Best regards,

Stefan

 Dear Stefan

Thank you very much for the answer. I did not have a chance to implement this yet.

I have a  follow up question: 

Is the following sequence already implemented in the DRS oscilloscope program? Could you point me to an example of such a sequence?

- arm DRS4 board

- wait for trigger by calling IsBusy()

- read out DRS4 board

- call StartDomino(), which re-enables also the trigger through

 

Cheers

Dmitry

 

 

  367   Fri Sep 12 11:52:21 2014 Dmitry Hitssynchronizing two DRS4 evaluation boards readout with one computer

 Hi everyone,

Has anyone tried to synchronize 2 (two) DRS4 evaluation boards readout by the same computer? I have read about some attempts on this board in the past, but I do not know if they have succeeded. If yes, could you share your experience and/or software.

Thank you very much,

Dmitry.

 

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