The cfgPixie16.txt File

Authors

Aaron Chester, Jeromy Tompkins

Date

7/18/23

Introduction

The cfgPixie16.txt file is a human-readable configuration file for DDAS systems and is required by the QtScope and ddasReadout programs at startup to specify which modules exist and how to boot them. It also allows the user to override the default firmware or provide firmware information if it is absent. The cfgPixie16.txt file describes the module slot map and DSP settings file for a single crate. For systems containing more than one DDAS crate, one cfgPixie16.txt file is required for each crate. See the documentation for the ConfigurationParser and Configuration classes which read this file and store information about the system configuration.

cfgPixie16.txt Format

The basic format of the cfgPixie16.txt file is as follows:

CRATE_ID
NUM_MODULES
SLOT_MODULE_0   [Per-module-firmware-map [per-module-set-file]]
SLOT_MODULE_1   [Per-module-firmware-map [per-module-set-file]]
...
SLOT_MODULE_N-1 [Per-module-firmware-map [per-module-set-file]]
PATH_TO_SETTINGS_FILE

where CRATE_ID is a non-negative number, NUM_MODULES is a positive number, SLOT_MODULE_X is a number greater than or equal to 2, and PATH_TO_SETTINGS_FILE is a legitimate path to a DSP settings file. In the top section, the parser will ignore up to 256 characters following the leftmost integer or string found on each line. Because of this, it is customary to add notes on each of these lines. There is no convention for adding notes, though many people like to use a #.

As an example, consider a PXI crate with two installed Pixie-16 modules: one in slot 2 and one in slot 4. The cfgPixie16.txt for such a system will be:

1  # crateID
2  # number of modules
2  # slot for mod 0
4  # slot for mod 1
/aaron/readout/crate_1/crate_1.json

where /aaron/readout/crate_1/crate_1.json specifies the path to my DSP settings file.

Note

An example cfgPixie16.txt file can be found in $DAQSHARE/ddasreadout/crate_1/ for NSCLDAQ versions 12.0 and later, and in $DDAS_SHARE/readout/crate_1/ for NSCLDAQ versions prior to 12.0 as part of the broken-out installation of DDAS located in /usr/opt/ddas. The environment variables DAQSHARE and DDAS_SHARE are set when sourcing the NSCLDAQ daqsetup.bash and ddassetup.bash scripts, respectively.