Notes on EQUIP

KevinWheelock's picture
Submitted by KevinWheelock on Wed, 08/17/2016 - 12:17
University of Washington QuarkNet Center

Notes on EQUIP

 

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ST Command

 

The “time interval” field for the “Status output” control determines how often the ST command is sent to the DAQ; it does NOT affect how often a dataline is written to the raw data textfile. Thus, it will not (directly) affect the analyses or graphs produced by eLab.

 

Essentially, the ST command is a “health check” of the DAQ; voltage, GPS (including number of satellites), temperature, and so on). The default value in EQUIP is ST 3 x

 

For a well-functioning card and detector array, issuing the ST command only needs to be done “occasionally” (once per hour?); for troubleshooting, more often. Keep in mind that, while the card is processing the ST command, it is not taking data.

 

HOWEVER: The "time interval" does affect how often the graphs in the EQUIP program get updated.

 

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OSX 10.11 ("El Capitan")

 

EQUIP does not work out of the box on OSX 10.11 "El Capitan" (and presumptively won't with future versions of OSX). Specifically: Installation of the SI Labs UART-USB drivers fails, even though the installation program claims it succeeded. The symptom is that the virtual serial ports don't appear in the "Serial port:" drop-down control.

 

I am pretty certain that the issue that the kernel extensions ("kexts", in OSX terminology) that SI Labs tries to install are not "signed" by Apple; a new security feature of OSX 10.11 is that unsigned kexts are not allowed to run. However, it is possible to bypass this. I am not going post the method here, since it is a security risk. However, Google is your friend...

 

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