9.4. Running VMUSBReadout

There is a detailed overview of how to run VMUSBReadout in the comprehensive documentation of NSCLDAQ. In this section we will assume that that has been read already and we will proceed by defining a simple launcher script.

Unless you intend to keep your configuration scripts in the directory ~/config, you are required to specify the location of the configuration scripts at launch. To avoid this, we will generate a short bash script that will launch VMUSBReadout with the local configuration scripts. To do so, we create a script called govmusb that has the following contents.


#!/bin/sh                           (1)

$DAQBIN/VMUSBReadout --daqconfig=$PWD/daqconfig.tcl --ctlconfig=$PWD/ctlconfig.tcl (2)
    
(2)
We assume that the DAQBIN environment variable has been specified by sourcing the daqsetup.bash script. If you have not done this, you can source the script by doing (at the NSCL):

spdaqXX> unset DAQROOT
spdaqXX> source /usr/opt/nscldaq/11.0/daqsetup.bash
        

The PWD environment is defined by default and stands for "present working directory." Note that this implies that the configuration scripts must live in the directory that the govmusb script is executed from.

To make the script executable, we have to change the permissions. Unless you want to prevent other people from executing the launcher script you can let all users execute it. To do that we use the chmod command.


spdaqXX> chmod a+x govmusb
    

At this point you should be able to start up VMUSBReadout by executing the script. That is done by doing:


spdaqXX> ./govmusb
    

At the prompt of VMUSBReadout, you can use the begin, end, pause, and resume commands to start, stop, pause, and resume runs.