Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Folks,

 

Release R7-1 of the synApps mca module is now available.  This is from the release notes at http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/mcaReleaseNotes.html

 

 

SIS38XX support

 

- Fixed a serious bug when reading the FIFO on the SIS3820. For non-DMA reads it was previously using a call to memcpy(). This can cause bus errors because memcpy() is not guaranteed to do 32-bit word transfers, which the SIS3820 requires. In fact if the number of words to copy was exactly 1 then a bus error was ocurring, because memcpy() appears to do 4 8-bit transfers in this case.

 

- Added support to control the polarity of the control outputs on the SIS3820. Choices are Normal and Inverted.

 

- Added PINI=YES to Channel1Source and EnableClientWait records. Without this the initial channel 1 source was always internal until the record was forced to process.

 

- Fixed some bugs in SIS38XX drivers that happened on some systems that appear to be getting extra interrupts. Added additional asynTrace debugging to drivers to help track down this type of problem.

 

- Tracked down problem on the SIS3820 with too many counts in the first time bin in MCS mode when using External Channel Advance. This happens if there are pulses present on the first counter input. Apparently the unit is becoming enabled (i.e. counting) before the first external LNE pulse arrives. This is a bug in the SIS3820 firmware. The workaround is to not have any hardware connection to the first counter input, and just use the internal 50MHz clock on this input. This problem is fixed in firmware release 0x010F, which is now available from SIS.

 

- Fixed bugs in the calls to devReadProbe in both the SIS3801 and SIS3820 drivers which were missing a needed "&" operator on the address to be probed.

 

mca record

 

- The STIM field and the record time stamp were changed to record the time that acquisition stopped rather than the time that acquisition started. This was changed because in multi-element detector systems like the DXP xMAP or the SIS38XX MCS the MCA records only process when acquisition completes, not when it starts. In this situation the record time stamp and the STIM field were never being updated. The MCA record always processes when acquisition completes, so this field is now correctly updated, but has changed its meaning.

 

Minor fixes to medm adl files to make them work with the adl-BOY translator.

 

This is the home page:

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

 

This is the latest tar file:

http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/pub/mcaR7-1.tgz

 

Cheers,

Mark