Welcome to the documentation of ABCD!

ABCD is a distributed Data Acquisition (DAQ) framework, in which each task related to the DAQ runs in a separate process (e.g. data acquisition, hardware management, data processing, analysis,…). Its main application is the acquisition of data from signal digitizers in Nuclear Physics experiments. The system is composed of a set of simple modules that exchange information through dedicated communication sockets. ABCD supports the acquisition from various signal digitizers from different vendors (e.g. CAEN, SP Devices, Red Pitaya, and Digilent). The user interface is implemented as a web-service and can be accessed with a regular web browser.

Check Hardware support for further information on the list of tested digitizers, the Tutorial for a step-by-step guide that includes the Installation instructions.

Note

This project is under active development.

• 1. Introduction on ABCD
  • 1.1. Distributed systems
  • 1.2. Modules
  • 1.3. Typical system structure
• 2. Hardware support
  • 2.1. CAEN digitizers
  • 2.2. SP Devices
  • 2.3. Digilent
  • 2.4. Red Pitaya
  • 2.5. PicoScope
• 3. Tutorial
  • 3.1. Installation
    • 3.1.1. Download
    • 3.1.2. Packages installation
    • 3.1.3. Manual installation
      • 3.1.3.1. Compilation
      • 3.1.3.2. Ubuntu package(s) generation and installation
    • 3.1.4. Vendors libraries
      • 3.1.4.1. CAEN digitizers
      • 3.1.4.2. SP Devices
      • 3.1.4.3. Digilent
      • 3.1.4.4. Red Pitaya
  • 3.2. Getting acquainted with a simulated experiment
    • 3.2.1. Launching a replay
    • 3.2.2. The digitizer interface page
    • 3.2.3. The waveforms display pages
    • 3.2.4. The waveforms analysis page
    • 3.2.5. The saving data page
      • 3.2.5.1. Using the data saver
      • 3.2.5.2. Information displayed during data saving
    • 3.2.6. The spectrum calculator page
      • 3.2.6.1. Pulse Shape Discrimination calculation
      • 3.2.6.2. Time decay of spectra
      • 3.2.6.3. Plotting controls
      • 3.2.6.4. The channels configuration
      • 3.2.6.5. Missing spectra of active channels
    • 3.2.7. The Time-of-Flight (ToF) calculator page
      • 3.2.7.1. Plotting controls
      • 3.2.7.2. The channels configuration
    • 3.2.8. Shutting down ABCD
  • 3.3. Analysis of saved data files
    • 3.3.1. Conversion of events files to ASCII
    • 3.3.2. Plotting energy spectra
    • 3.3.3. Plotting Pulse Shape Discrimination diagrams
    • 3.3.4. Studying timestamps
    • 3.3.5. Dependency of the energy spectrum on time
    • 3.3.6. Calculating Time-of-Flights
    • 3.3.7. Waveforms displaying
  • 3.4. Advanced topic: writing a startup script
    • 3.4.1. Starting up approach
    • 3.4.2. Environment variables
    • 3.4.3. Installation verification
    • 3.4.4. tmux session startup
    • 3.4.5. Web-server for the user interface
    • 3.4.6. Loggers
    • 3.4.7. Time-of-Flight calculation module
    • 3.4.8. Coincidences calculations and data streams generation
    • 3.4.9. Data saving modules
    • 3.4.10. Spectra calculation modules
    • 3.4.11. Starting the data replay
    • 3.4.12. Conclusion
  • 3.5. Advanced topic: writing a simple waan library
    • 3.5.1. Introduction to the library
    • 3.5.2. Preamble of the library
    • 3.5.3. Parameters
    • 3.5.4. Analysis function
    • 3.5.5. Analysis algorithm
    • 3.5.6. Output
    • 3.5.7. Compilation
• 4. Available modules
  • 4.1. Hardware interfacing modules
  • 4.2. On-line analysis modules
  • 4.3. Datastream filters
  • 4.4. Utilities modules for the framework
• 5. Starting up an instance
  • 5.1. Scripts description
  • 5.2. Shutting down ABCD
  • 5.3. Checking if ABCD is running and troubleshooting
  • 5.4. Acquisition events logging
  • 5.5. Automatic startup of ABCD at computer startup
    • 5.5.1. systemd service installation
• 6. Interacting with ABCD
  • 6.1. Web-based interface
  • 6.2. Command line interface
• 7. Data files and serialization
  • 7.1. File types
  • 7.2. Binary protocols
    • 7.2.1. Waveforms binary protocol
    • 7.2.2. Processed events binary protocol
  • 7.3. Example files
  • 7.4. Displaying and plotting saved files
  • 7.5. Files conversion
  • 7.6. Other files utilities
  • 7.7. Data serialization
• 8. Saving data
• 9. System simulation by replaying data files
  • 9.1. Replaying raw files
  • 9.2. Replaying events files
• 10. Timestamps determination
  • 10.1. Introduction
  • 10.2. Precision of digital numbers
  • 10.3. Fixed-point values
  • 10.4. Timestamps determination in ABCD
  • 10.5. Case study: timestamps from ADQ36 digitizers with different sampling frequencies
• 11. General purpose waveforms analysis: waan module
  • 11.1. Module structure
  • 11.2. Analysis functions
  • 11.3. Configuration
  • 11.4. Example configuration
  • 11.5. Libraries compilation
  • 11.6. Example libraries
  • 11.7. User interface
  • 11.8. Replay of data files
• 12. Temporal coincidence filter: cofi module
  • 12.1. Algorithm
  • 12.2. Coincidence windows
  • 12.3. Output
  • 12.4. Program options
  • 12.5. Replay of data files
• 13. On-line Time-of-Flight calculator: tofcalc module
  • 13.1. Algorithm
  • 13.2. Coincidence windows
  • 13.3. Time decay of spectra
  • 13.4. Example configuration
  • 13.5. User interface