Links:
Research on Scintillators
|
Hello all again...this year I'm not on Theory team due to the fact that it doesn't exist this year. This year I happen to be on the Web/Software team for this years research. I'm rewriting the software for turning on the photomultiplier tubes, and it's not going very well!The problem with the PMT turn-on program is that the Keithley board can output at close to 10MHz and the Testpoint drivers do not. We are going to try serial ports (RS232) and compile the script into an executable to make it faster. We are hopeing to turn the TestPoint interpretive code time of 200ms to a compiled time of less than 10ms so that the PMT don't timeout before all bits and words are addressed to it. Otay, now that I have tried to compile the program and of course it compiled okay with some problems in installation..I finally got it to run and I updated all the drivers to make it run all smooth and fast as possible and...you guessed it!!! It doesn't work at all! It sends absolutely no signal to the PMT's and the DLINX DIO1 driver or something isn;t working because it doesn't even output anything. I think that when the compiling was done none of the propr configuration was transferred so that anything done onto the output was therefore no going anywhere and we have absolutely no signal! It is really making me mad and I don't want to work on this anymore so I went on to calculating geomagnetic rigidity numbers for our latitude and all the entry angles from 90 degrees and coming from zenith to 0 degrees and skimming the horizon. So far i have been sucessful on that! We have officially abandoned the TestPoint program and I installed the Microsoft Visual Studio Professional Version onto my computer this morning and started to write a Visual Basic program for setting the PMT voltages and possibly taking data from, instead of the Keithly A/D boards, from RS232 serial ports. So far I have made some progress and I have the layout made, but I don't have the actual code done. This process will take a while to complete and will be done by next summer and probably during the year since I will be at South High School during the year for data analysis. This year has accomplished alot of things including finishing the telescope bases and starting the database and doing alot of the electronics. |
This page is made and maintained by Jason Fox.
|