COLLECT

Collect is a data collection program for nuclear physics.  

Compatibility, Architecture, Licence

Data collection, or Data Acquisition, or DAQ, in physics, is the process of reading some kind of ADCs or the alikes, and storing the values in files, in some format, on some kind of computing device, so that they can be analyzed afterwards. Usually, while doing this, they are also presented on screen, so that who is running the experiment can have an idea of what is going on.

Compatibility:

Collect has been written to run on a iX86 PC, under the Linux OS, to read data from a CAMAC crate, using a List Sequencer.
The present version uses a GPIB interface to the CAMAC crate, and stores data into HBOOK ntuples. In particular, the present installation uses a (clone of) National Instruments AT-GPIB board on the PC, a Kinetic Systems 3988-G2A GPIB crate controller, and Kinetic Systems 3982-Z5B List Sequencer.
Until now, we only had compatibility problems with one CAMAC module, that required a sophisticated initialization and readout, and it has been solved.

I've been contacted by a few people, asking what was necessary to use it. At the moment, it has only been tested on the exact hardware described above. But I'm not pessimist about porting it to a different configuration:

• different GPIB card:
  There is no reason in the world why one shouldn't be able to use it , as long as it is supported by the GPIB drivers for Linux.
• different GPIB crate controller:
  Using one should not be a big problem, as long as it supports the needed functions.
• different CAMAC List Sequencer:
  idem, it should be ok, just somewhat harder to debug (the configuration of the list sequencer is one of the most delicate parts).
• different interface (not GPIB)
  this could be relatively easy if you have a low level driver for that; otherwise, it could be a lot of work
• no List Sequencer:
  no, I don't think you can do this. See the reason why in the Architecture.
• no CERNLIB:
  if you are interested in porting Collect to a different data storage, visualization and analysis engine, feel free to do so. At the moment being, we are not interested in this, so we will only provide minimal support.
  

Please note that nobody, at the moment, is funding me to keep on developing Collect, so i only have a very restricted amount of time for this, and will only provide bug fixes and some documentation.
Anyway, unless something unexpected happens to me, i will be happy to help in porting this program to different environments, if you can get some funding for me, or give a contribution to SRC; i would be expecially happy if you could pay me the travel and living expenses so that i could come to your place and get it working for you :-)

Architecture:

This is a single threaded program, written in C++.
The largest bottlenecks in the program are in data storage (HBOOK libs are quite slow).

Because of this, Collect is just not suited for working without a List Sequencer that works as a buffer.
Collect runs in this way:

1. inizializes the CAMAC and all the modules
2. loads a "program" in the execution memory
3. configures the modules for data taking, if necessary
   

Licence

Collect as been developed by Sergio Ballestrero, supported (founding and testing) by the Schonland Research Centre; as such, it is copyrighted jointly by S.Ballestrero and S.R.C.

Collect is OpenSource software, licensed under the GPL, with a few restrictions and one caveat:

We would really appreciate if you:

• inform us of the use of the program;
  this will be published on these pages: you can choose not to publish your name, or ask us not to publish at all your application.
• inform us of modifications to the program
  we will integrate the patches in the main distribuition, if you provide us with them and help in testing the updated release; else we'll just mention the availability of your patches, along with reference to you.
  
• in any published articles on experiments that used Collect,
  add a reference to SRC, S.Ballestrero or (preferrably) to the paper published by SRC:
  
• notify us of published articles on experiments that used Collect, and possibly provide us with both an electronic and a paper copy.

Please note that we are not going to enforce this, since legally this software is licensed under the GPL. We just feel the need to insist on things that are commonly considered good practice in the OpenSource community, and on things that are required practice in the physics community.

Downloads

• version 1998-09-04