FTPC Drift Velocity Monitor

The FTPC drift velocity monitor program runs on bond.starp.bnl.gov
which is located in the STAR gas room in the FTPC gas rack.

Software:  
         Windows NT
         LabView

LabView collects data samples and stores then on disk. You can see
if data is being collected in the "Peak position" window.

Select the "STOP (after this run+1)"  button to stop the program. In this
case the program will continue running until the current sample is finished.

Select the "STOP (immediately at current sample)" button to stop the program
immediately; in this case the current sample will be lost.

To restart the drift velocity monitor program, activate the big window 
(Read_DriftVelMonitor.vi) by clicking on the upper window border with the
left mouse button. The border will turn blue when the window is active.

Check the following fields and correct if necessary:
  Trigger in Mv = 80
  # of runs     =  use a big number, i.e. 30000
  File  Path to store the files = J:\DV2\Today
  Attention: it is very important that you check this path!!!

Using the keyboard, set the "read # samples" field to 5000 (this is the
maximum number of events which can be collected in memory for one sample)
When all settings are correct click on the "->" button at the top of the window to start the program.
And then, click on "Start daq" with the left mouse button.

Actually (year 2003 and later) in the data taking, the data sample files are named 
DVM-Rawdatayyyy-mo-dd--hh-mm.bin:
   yyyy= year
   mo= month (01-12)
   dd= day-of-month (01-31)
   hh= hour (01-23)
   mm = minutes (00-59)
These files are stored in /virgo/data1/Data/DV2/Today
     
/virgo/data1 is cross-mounted with bond via a Samba connection.
To check if Samba is running on virgo, logon to virgo. Use "ps -fe | grep smbd" 
to check if the samba demon is running. Michael Vidal has provided two 
shell scripts with which you can stop and start the samba demon: 
"smbstop" and "smbstart"

Contact Uwe Leupold if you have any questions regarding Samba.
 
There is a cron demon running on virgo which archives the files collected
for one day. The cron job script is in 
   /root/Scripts/dv_script
The entry in /etc/crontab is:
   55 23 * * * /root/Scripts/dv_script
This script runs every night at 23:00 (11:00 PM) EST

To check if the cron demon is running on virgo type "ps -fe|grep crond"
If the cron daemon is running, you will see something like
     root     31127     1  0 Sep08 ?        00:00:02 crond

Only root can start and stop the cron demon  with the commands:
 /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S90crond  stop
 /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S90crond  start

Actually (since 2003) data taking, the cron job archives all the files collected
for one day in a new  subdirectory in /virgo/data1/Data/DV2/Store.
The new subdirectory is named DVM-Rawdatayyyy-mm-dd (example DVM-Rawdata2003-03-10):
   yyyy= year
   mm= month (01-12)
   dd= day-of-month (01-31)

From time to time this data is copied to the MPI where it is analysed.

__________________________________________________________________________________
PAST INFORMATION ABOUT FILE NAMES

For year 2001-2002 data taking, the data sample files were named 
     rawdata0.bin - rawdata9.bin
These files where stored in /virgo/data1/Data/DV/Today

For year 2001-2002 data taking, the cron job archived all the files collected 
for one day in a new  subdirectory in /virgo/data1/Data/DV/Store.
The new subdirectory was named DvData_nnn_mmm_dd_yyyy (example: DvData_Wed_Sep_19_2001):
   nnn= day (Mon-Sun)
   mmm= month (Jan-Dec)
   dd= day-of-month (01-31)
   yyyy= year
__________________________________________________________________________________ 
   

• Kalibrierung der Driftgeschwindigkeit von Elektronen im Kammergas der Vorwärts-Spurdriftkammern (FTPCs) des Experiments STAR (Andreas Gärtner (german, zipped ps, 4.9MB))
• Untersuchung eines Monitors zur Messung der Elektronendriftgeschwindigkeit in einem Ar/CO2 Gasgemisch (Peter Maierbeck (german, zipped ps, 7.3MB))