bw@lanl.ARPA (Barbara Weintraub) (11/21/86)
[] This is a repost, because I'm not sure that the original went out... Does anyone have experience using a Macintosh computer for data acquisition and control of experiments? This request covers the new commercial software/hardware packages (eg, LabView, BenchTop) and those developed for use in your own lab. Can a Mac function as a digitizer or storage 'scope with added hardware? Any information and opinions are welcome. Thanks, Barbara Weintraub USnail: LANL Los Alamos Nat'l Lab CLS-7, MS E525 ARPA: bw@lanl Los Alamos, NM 87545 UUCP: ...cmcl2!lanl!bw Phone: (505) 667-9742
taylor@cernvax.UUCP (taylor) (11/24/86)
CERN has experience of using MacVEE Plus systems in the laboratory for data acquisition, experiment control and monitoring, as well as for equipment development and test. MacVEE (Microcomputer Applied to the Control of VME Electronic Equipment) provides direct memory-mapped access from the Macintosh (or Macintosh Plus) to up to 8 VMEbus crates, or up to 7 VMEbus crates and 8 CAMAC crates via Mac-CC, a dedicated Macintosh CAMAC crate controller. Small physics experiments have been successfully completed in which the only computer used was a MacVEE system with CAMAC. At a large experiment, such as UA1 at the proton-antiproton collider, the data acquisition itself is performed by a distributed system of 65 VMEbus CPUs and 134 other VME/VMXbus modules, and a dozen MacVEEs are used in the control room for the programming, control and monitoring of these. One MacVEE at UA1 is dedicated to perform as the data acquisition console, and it also carries out automatically the functions of the old experimenter's log book (recording all operator commands, selected histograms, diagnostics etc). Other MacVEE systems are used for the control of trigger processors comprising farms of SLAC/CERN emulators of IBM mainframes (six 168 and six 3081) through their VMEbus interfaces. In a MacVEE system, the selected external VMEbus or CAMAC address space simply appears within the address space of the Mac's 68000, so that no special drivers are required to access it. User-vectored interrupts from VME can be handled, as well as CAMAC LAMs. A composite video signal output is provided for use by remote video monitors. Mac-CC is equipped with a standard auxiliary controller bus (like a type A2 crate controller) allowing multiple controllers in a CAMAC crate, and operates in conjunction with standard LAM graders. The MacVEE VMEbus interface module has system controller capability as well as allowing multi-processing in the VMEbus crates. The introduction of the Macintosh has led to some interesting new approaches to providing interactive user interfaces to laboratory experiments. For example, when a data acquisition MacVEE detects any abnormality in the statistics, it highlights the corresponding histogram on its multi-histogram display (and outputs a speech message). To obtain more detailed information, the operator just has to click on a chosen histogram with the mouse to see an expanded display with additional diagnostic data. It proves much easier for the physicists on shift to master this type of user interface to a complex apparatus than to have to remember the sequences of a conventional command language. A total of 176 MacVEE systems are currently in use. I can provide a limited number of copies of the MacVEE User Manual to other professional researchers. B.G. Taylor EP Division CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 1211 Geneva 23 Switzerland Bitnet: bgt.wb@gen Arpanet: bgt.wb%gen.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa Usenet: bgt.wb@gen.bitnet.uucp