I'o still smug about having gotten the TDC to work.
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SUCCESS

After 6 weeks of banging my head against the wall, I've managed to get
the TDC working. It wasn't obvious, and I had to manually write some
functions that weren't very pretty, but it works. What I think it was
is that the default configuration the CAEN TDC came with was set to
look at a range outside the TDC's capabilities, so it wouldn't take
data.

This does not, however, explain why it wouldn't acquire data until I
had loaded it into LabView. My best guess is that there was something
strange configured in the TDC itself that the standard code was
struggling with, but when LabView was loaded it reset everything to a
usable state.

Now I need to loop over all the channels and export the data to files.
Not as obvious as it seems, in fact, considering once again CAEN has
half-assed their code and defined functions which do not work.

I'm ambitious this morning.

Over the weekend I think I figured out how to get the CAEN TDC to
work. Friday, it miraculously decided to talk to the computer, but in
doing so, stopped taking data. I'm pretty sure the (only?) thing I've
to do now is set up some arbitrary data and then in theory add one or
two lines of code to a configuration file.

I'm quite curious as to what I'll tackle once all this CAEN stuff is done.

...VME....

In my final attempt to get the VME hardware working, I've downloaded a 3rd party application that CAEN has software for. It's all GUI, and what few papers I have found that use this hardware all use it. The only catch is that I once mentioned it  omy supervisor, about a month ago, and he wasn't totally enthusiastic. Even if the trial lapses, I do have the opportunity to test the TDC and see if it works at all.

I just noticed that my last phone calls made to or from my cell were over 10 days ago.


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Symmetries

It would seem as though working alone in the machine shop leads to many fewer chances of messing up a measurement or motion. It also means you can be twice as fast working with a milling machine. The rack brackets I made this time around were perfectly symmetrical and fit nicely into the racks.

While making them, however, I did somehow manage to get the sawblade to jump off it's track on the band saw, which produced a mighty scary noise, but had no other ill effects. I'm hoping that I get to spend more time in the machine shop, albeit I don't know if my supervisor has any more work for me to do there. I can think of 1001 different <i>personal</i> projects to work on, but I don't think that David would appreciate paying me while I cut custom components for my launch pad.

Today, I test out an HV power supply and try to get the last data points required to finish my PMT calibration.

Back in the Machine Shop today. I've got to make some more rack
mounts. Hopefully this time they'll come out symmetric.