This book is an attempt to pull together in one document everything a user of the NSCL Data acquisition system will need to know. This book may seem overwhelming at first. It is large. What do you need to read, what can you skip? This will depend on what you know, and what you are trying to accomplish.
The book is organized into two parts: A presentation of the system and a reference. Use the presentation part when you need to understand how to perform a particular task with the system. Use the reference when you need to find a missing piece of information to complete that task.
The first part of this document, a presentation of the system contains the following material:
Orientation - This provides an high level picture of the NSCL data acquisition system, components and philosophy. Before attempting to use or configure the system you should be familiar with the material in this chapter.
Sources of Data - Describes how the NSCL Data Acquisition system gets the data from an experiment, and takes you through a worked set of examples. If you must write a readout program or modify existing readout software, you will need to be familiar with the material in this chapter.
Viewing the Data - Describes how to create parameter sets that the NSCL online analysis program, SpecTcl, can sort into histograms. If you are customizing your own version of SpecTcl or adding additional analysis steps to an existing version of SpecTcl, you should become familiar with the material in this section.
Experiment Integration - Describes how to integrate the components of your experiment into a coherent whole. If you want to provide a superstructure on top of your program that may make the process of running an experiment easier and less mistake-prone, you should become familiar with this experiment.
Best Practices - Describes some best practices for building an experiment that can undergo continuing development, multiple re-deployment, and integration with other experimental setups. If you are just building a one-time experiment, that will never be re-used feel free to skip this section. If you are building, or maintaining software for a supported experimental device, that will be used over and over again, in many configurations, and in conjunction with other detector system, this chapter provides some suggestions that can make your life easier in the long run.
Data Analysis - The NSCL data acquisition and analysis system does not attempt to be the be-all, end-all for data analysis. Other analysis systems built by larger teams of very good programmers are available. This section describes what to do with your data after data taking is complete, and how to export your data to these other analysis systems.