Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:46:12 -0600

Folks,

I have released version R6-10 of the EPICS "mca" module for multichannel
analyzer systems.  

These are from the release notes (available at
http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mcaReleaseNotes.html)

- mcaSrc 
   - Fixed bug in MCA record. The record must force a read of the data
whenever acquisition completes (.ACQG=1 changes to    .ACQG=0). In
earlier versions it could miss this transition if acquisition was
complete by the time of the first status poll. The bug fix in R6-9
attempted to fix this, but it was inefficient and not completely
effective. The new fix is for the record to force .ACQG=1 whenever
acquisition is started, and not rely on the poll to set .ACQG to 1. 

- CanberraSrc 
   - Changed the code to read data from the new AIM modules (556A,
DSA2000) in uncompressed mode. This improves the performance by about a
factor of 3 over the previous code which used compressed mode for all
AIM models. These newer models are very slow to compress the data
because they lack a co-processor. The older 556 modules are still read
in compressed format, because it is faster. With this change the time to
acquire spectra quickly from the 556 and 556A is virtually identical.
Performance measurements are tabulated here:
http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mcaCanberra.html#Performance%20
Measurements

   - Added code to use LLC sockets on vxWorks (rather than etherLib) and
Linux (rather than libnet and libpcap). Thanks to Peter Denision of DLS
for the initial version of this code. This change is needed for vxWorks
5.5, because the older etherHook functions are no longer supported. It
is also useful on Linux because the IOC application does not need to be
run as root.

- RontecSrc 
   - Bug fix for Rontec driver. It was sometimes getting garbage for the
elapsed real time. (Thanks to Lewis Muir). 

The main page for this module is here:

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mca

The documentation is here:

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mcaDoc.html

Happy Holidays,
Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System