Manual run

The procedure describe here is equivalent to what is done using pycaldaq scripts but in the command line.

The first thing to do is to load the configuration you have built in the config section.

load_config_file.sh /opt/calicoes/config/ecal.xml

After loading the configuration, you have to initialize the system. In this phase, no communication will be done with the hardware, it is just to initialize and fill the memory structure of the software.

initialize.sh

One the system is initialized, you can configure it.

configure.sh

This phase is typically the one where problems occurs. If it is the case, reset your hardware, check your configuration file and try again.

After the configuration, the system is ready for data acquisition. At this point we can proceed in two ways:

The first mode is the preferred one. Bypassing those high-level modules can be useful for debugging purposes but a deep knowledge of the Pyrame and Calicoes is required.

To use the Run Control, use the commands start_run.sh and stop_run.sh. The start_run command takes as a parameter the name of the run. It can contain slashes so that folders are created in the destination datadir. You can start and stop a run that will be stored in /home/data/myrun/data_... with the following commands:

start_run.sh myrun/data
stop_run.sh

I the run already exists, an error will be returned. A second argument of start_run.sh (remove or append) allows to overwrite existing runs with the same name:

start_run.sh myrun/data remove

To bypass the Run Control, use the commands startacq.sh and stopacq.sh. The startacq transition takes as a parameter the name of the run. Because we are bypassing the RunDB, the data destination will be /home/data/nodb by default. The following command will store the data at /home/data/nodb/today/mytest_....

startacq.sh today/mytest

A second, optional, argument of startacq.sh allows to modify the datadir:

startacq.sh today/mytest /tmp

This is the fun time. You can verify that data are arriving by looking in the /opt/calicoes/raw_data folder and seeing if the running_* files size increase.

If it is not the case, check that your spill pattern generator is well configured. In our example, you can also check the actually used configuration at /home/data/nodb/today/mytest.xml.

When you have enough data, you can stop the run.

stopacq.sh

The file /home/data/nodb/today/mytest.log contains the timing and the statistics of your run.

If you want to load another configuration, you can simply invalidate the configuration and deinitialize the system and then cycle again.

invalidate.sh
deinitialize.sh
load_config_file.sh /opt/calicoes/config/newconfig.xml
initialize.sh
configure.sh
...

You can also want to make just a little change on your system like changing the trigger threshold level and run again. In that case, just after the startacq, you can use the reconfigure transition to do that. Here is an example:

reconfigure.sh skiroc_1_1_1_1 set_gtrigger_skiroc 170

You are then ready to start a new acquisition

startacq.sh run_thres_170

For more information on the Calicoes scripting, please see the Pycaldaq section