First Test of Bill’s Board

1)Hardware setup. The HPTDC Tester Board Rev. 0 09/30/2005 (“Bill’s board”) should be connected to the PC through a Byte Blaster Cable, to the National Instruments DAQ board through the NI bus cable (pins 1-50), and to a function generator supplying a TTL pulse going to the Test Pulse input. The National Instruments DAQ board has been installed within the PC tower.

2)Software. LabView, as well as the program directories jam_tdc (programs used to set up the HPTDC through JTAG), vhdl (containing code for the FPGA) and LabView (code that reads data out of the board) need to be installed on the PC.

3)Power. Theboard must be supplied with a +5 V, -5V and ground. Currently, we use the +5V floating point, GND and -5V point of a 1650 TRI-OUTPUT Power Supply located on the workbench next to Bill’s board and PC. The + 5 V source mustsupply at least 1 A of current to the board.

4)TTL signal. A signal 10 us wide with 500 Hz rate will give the expected output. To monitor the signal on a Tectronix oscilloscope, we currently use a T-cable connection to the scope and set the scope impedance to 50 ohms if using a 50 ohm impedance cable, to avoid reflection of signal by high scope impedance. Set up like so:

5)Power on the board. It should draw 0.7 A on the +5V input.

6)Open a DOS Command Prompt window on the PC, go to C:\ jam_tdc and type:

jam_tdc.exe –aconfig_basic TDIG.jam

This sets up the TDC. Current should increase by 0.1 A at 5V point.

7) Type:

jam_tdc.exe –alock TDIG.jam

This sets up the DLL lock to 1.

8)Type:

jam_tdc.exe –astatus TDIG.jam

This checks TDC status. All the output bits should be 0, except the following 3:

DLL lock=1

trigger_fifo_empty=1

readout_fifo_empty=1

9)Go to C:\ LabView and type:

HPTDC_ReadSinglesAndCoinData.vi

A LabView window will open automatically and you will see the Front Panel with a histogram-like graph. Click on the “run” button (a white arrow in the upper right corner). After a few seconds, you should obtain a narrow time-difference peak histogram with Bin value approximately 129.

10)Troubleshooting. Sometimes, when running LabView you may encounter error messages due to changed file paths (this happens when connecting the system to another PC, or moving the code files .vi in different directories on the same PC). To address this and get the HPTDC_ReadSinglesAndCoinData.vito run again, you need to change the default file paths manually. In the LabView window, go to Window Open Block Diagram. In the new window that will open, you will see a frame-by-frame diagram of the LabView code. Go to Frame 1 by scrolling with frame scroll button (two backward/forward arrows on top of the frame ribbon). In Frame 1, open “Read INL Data” by double-clicking on its icon, and change the file paths to what applies to your data acquisition PC. To save these changes, go to Edit and select the “Make changes default” option, then save the Read INL Data.vi file.