1.3. Documentation roadmap

This document can be logically divided into two segments. The first segment consists of parts that are introductory material to various software tools. The second segment provides extensive reference information in Unix Manpage format.

Installations of the software include the web documentation which is installed at $DAQROOT/share/html/index.html. Manual pages aer installed at $DAQROOT/share/man, so that e.g. man -M/usr/opt/daq/10.0/share/man spectcldaq will display the manpage for the spectcldaq utility.

1.3.1. Introductory Material

The introductory material is divided into several parts. Introductory material is only generated as html pages in the web documentation. It does not appear in the generated mapages.

commands

Documents a few free standing commands that tie the ring buffer data acquisition system togehter.

utilities

Documents the bulk of the shell command utilities.

libraries

Provides introductory material for the major libraries that define the API to subsystems of the DAQ software.

servers

Provides documentation on the persistent servers the system. Note that serveral utilities are transient client/server applications, however these are not documented in this section.

frameworks

Several of the more complex API's are provided as application frameworks. This section describes those frameworks.

1.3.2. Manpage sections.

Manpage sections provide detailed reference material for components of the system. In keeping with unix conventions, sections starting with 1 document commands that can be issued fromt he shell, sections beginning with 3 document libraries and frameworks. Sections beginning with 5 document configuration files and file formats.

1compatibility

The ring buffer data acuisition system provides serveral utiltities that make migration to it from nscldaq-8.x easy. Specifically, there are a set of utilities that provide the ability to hook clients that are used to seeing nscldaq-8.x style buffer formats tothe ring buffer daq. This section provides manpages for the full utility suite. The utilities are provided both as toolkit elements that can be used in unix pipelines and as scripts that build commonly used pipelines. This section descsribes both of these types of elements.

1daq

Documents commands that you will use explicitly or implicitly to build up your data acquisition system configuration. In some cases you may never directly invoke tools described in this section (e.g. ringtostdout), in other cases (e.g. ReadoutGui), these applications will be an integral part of the system and you will interact with them heavily.

1tcl

This section describes several pure Tcl applications. There is some overlap between this section and 1daq. For example, this section describes ScalerDisplay which, while it is a pure Tcl application might just as easily belong in the 1daq section.

1sbsReadout

Provides reference material that describes how you can invoke the SBS readout framework you have built to read data from your experiment. While, in general, the default invocation (without specifying options) is appropriate, for special application you may want to provide command line options to alter how the Readout program operates.

1usbReadout

Documents the USB Readout frameworks. The VMUSB/CCUSB Readout frameworks provide high performance access to VME and CAMAC crates. These frameworks allow you to describe the experiment in terms of a set of digitizers, their configurations and their readout orders. Coupled with a special version of SpecTcl, you can use this software to use a single configuration file to get from readout to raw spectra without a single line of C++ code.

3daq

Describes the bulk of the C++ classes that are provided for various stand alone APIs.

3tcl

Describes Tcl loadable packages you can use in your Tcl scripts.

3sbsReadout

Describes classes that are specifically part of the SBS readout application framework. Note that device support is described in 3daq, but classes you will interact with that are specific to the readout framework are described in this section.

3usbReadout

Most likely you don't need to read the man pages in this section. They provide reference documentation for the classes that make up the VM/CC usb readout framework. While at present only the VM-USB is supported, the framework is generic enough that CC-USB support can be built on top of it as well.

5tcl

Describes configuration file formats and contents for several Tcl utilities that require configuration files. In general the utilities that use configuration files documented in this section will have references to these pages. In the web version of this document, those references will be hyperlinks.