Xiao's 2011April run

April 19th - 25th

1. test and mount the new actuators for luminous stages test procedure:

 a. connect all 18 actuators in serial, three power line input.
 b. manually turn the knob to move each actuators at random position
 c. open the fiberexplorer gui, and home all the actuators, the yellow light
     turned on and off automatically, and the positions of all the actuators
     return to zero on the gui.
 d. repeat b and c several times, they work well each time.

2. field test of new MIRC hardware pieces.

   PCs pieces are not in the right position, need to be moved forward, left and downwards. (see my notebook)
   MIRC pieces need to move down a few mm (3 mm?)

3. New MIRC control system.

   a. upgrade devel account to sudoer list, copies files from /root/MIRC
   b. run % sudo RTscheduler 60000
              % spooler
       These two procedures are actually under /usr/local/bin/ as we found out later, not the ones
       inside the folder.
   c. open IRCam gui, and follow the normal observation procedure: update DAQ parameters, config camera, ...
   d. open fiberexplorer gui, and following the normal observation procedure: load camera conf, fiber mapping...
   All the above steps are working well, I didn't spot any error.

   Then I start to save some data, and find two errors.
   1. Frame counterror: receive only XXX out of 1500 frames.
   2. 4Header read error

   For the first error, I think we have seen that before. But it is happening more frequently, I saved 64 files, and it happened
   5 times.
   For the second error, I have never seen that before, is this the header problem you mentioned before? IT happened twice
   during saving 64 files.

   I looked into the saved files. Because we are not on a real target, I am not sure if the header is right. But it looks normal, nothing wired.

4. Since you have three copies there, I went into each directory under root account, and run them as

sudo ./RTschedule ./spooler

I tested all of them by saving data, here are the results.

a./home /ep41/control/MIRC/ Not working at all!

       The RTscheduler server gives error message: RT_PIPE_WRITE: out of memory
       The spooler gives message: 4header read error. 

I tried twice, same results.

b. /home /ep41/MIRC/ no single error! I saved 80 files, everything looks great. But after I killed the server properly, and tried to run that again, it failed. It didn't give any error message, just stopped after "sem_task created". I did spot a possible error message after I kill the spooler, "*********glibc detected*****, ./spooler: double free or corruption (!prev): 0x0845b1e8". So maybe there is some problem with cleaning up the memories when I kill the server.

c. /home /ep41/MIRC2010Aug10/ The first time it crashed when I clicked "config camera" on IRCam gui. It says segmentation error. So I reboot the computer. The second time it looks fine, I saved 40 files, and 4 frame counterror.

I also checked the executable files under /usr/local/bin, and compare the size of the files to the three versions, and I find that only the ones under /home /ep41/control/MIRC/ matches, but the last modification date are different. The one under /ep41/control/MIRC/ is more updated.