This guide provides tutorial and introduction material for NSCL researchers that needto convert their software from the NSCL Spectrodaq data acquisition system to the Ringbuffer data acquisition system. While the ring buffer data acquisition system (RingDaq) attempts to provide a high degree of source code compatibility with Spectrdaq data acquisition (SDAQ), there are some unavoidable differences.
As with SDAQ, the RingDaq provides a data acquisition framework into which experimenters must add a data source program (called Readout by convention), and an online analysis event unpacker (SpecTcl event processor(s)). This guide shows you how to d create these components from scratch as well as from existing SDAQ components you may already have. Each chapter of this guide is intended to be nearly standalone, with supplemental material provided in the reference guide at http://docs.nscl.msu/edu/daq/ringbuffer. This allows you to skip to the chapter that has the material you need next to get going:
First I'll describe how to create a readout program from scratch.
Following that is material that describes how to convert an existing SDAQ production readout program to a RingDaq readout program.
Next similar material is provided that describes how to create and adaptor that allows you to use code that you currently have to read data in SDAQ's readout classic framework.
Finally analyzing data from RingDaq with SpecTcl is described along with the set of change you might have to make to convert existing code from SDAQ to RingDaq.
In addition to the main material, the first appendix describes the format of data items that are put in the ring by readout programs.
The second appendix describes how to create user written triggers.
The third appendix describes a set of utilities that allow you to plug spectrodaq analysis components into the ringdaq system.