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The Readout program must run on a system that is physically connected to the VME crate containing your hardware. Note that the ReadoutShell tool can be used to wrap your program with a Graphical user interface (GUI), and run it on the requested remote system. While debugging your software we do not recommend this. It's better just to run the software from the command line, or under control of the gdb symbolic debugger (see man gdb for more information about this extremely powerful debugging tool).
In this section we will show how to use the command line to start your Readout program, start data taking, stop data taking, and exit it.
To start the readout software, form another terminal session to the computer that is connected to your VME crate, set the default directory to where you built your software and start the Readout program.
spdaqxx> cd ~/experiment/readout
spdaqxx> ./Readout
When Readout starts, it will prompt you for input with a % symbol.
The Readout program you have built runs an extended Tcl interpreter. Tcl is a scripting language that is widely used throughout the NSCL as an extension language. It provides a common base language for programming applications. Each program in turn extends this language with a set of commands that allow you to control the application itself.
The commands we will be working with are:
Begins a run. From the point of view of your code, the initialize and clear member functions of your event segment will be called. The Readout framework will continually check whether your trigger is satisfied and then call the read member function of your event segment when it is.
Ends a run. The readout framework stops responding to triggers.
Tell the readout program to start a run:
% begin
After some time passes and you are ready to end the run, you can do so by typing:
% end
At this point, you can either start a new run in the same way you just did or exit the Readout program entirely. To exit the program, you simply type:
% exit