Error loading config files

[antoninomiceli]

The ANL/AMO group (Gilles Doumy et al) recently bought a 750K which was "tuned" to work in APS 24-bunch mode for single bunch gating. This detector seems to have an issue loading the Lambda's config files. The IOC boots and takes images, but the images seems gumbled in EPICS. The data is there but messed up. They are ok with the vendor software (i.e., jive).

The EPICS error is:
LambdaConfig("LAMBDA1", "config", 0, 0, 0, 0)
2019/09/23 12:27:14.170 Lambda:connect Enter config
[ERROR] (GetDataFromLookupFolders): File size is not correct

[antoninomiceli]

@keenanlang thoughts were: "As far as I can tell from the lambda library source, the error is due to encountering the file 'Module_2019-006_Si_timing.txt' in the Module_2019-006_Si/lookups folder. There's some code that iterates through all the files in that folder, the nexus file gets ignored and all other files are treated as if they are either a correction, a nominator, or a pixelmask, if a file in the folder doesn't match the specified format of one of those files, it throws an error."

[antoninomiceli]

X-spectrum says:
"Keenan is right about the source of the error.

The “_timing.txt” files contains certain settings for fine-tuning the detector; these are specific to each detector. Previously, these settings were stored on the firmware card in the detector, but this made it difficult to optimize the settings or to update the firmware, so more recently we added functionality to load these settings through software. So, it reflects the fact that Gilles detector is newer.

This file has a different format to most of the other files in the lookups folder. As a result, the code that looks through the files in this folder to check for errors will interpret this this as a problem. This seems to be ignored in the Tango server, which is why we didn’t pick up on it when we added the “timing.txt” file, but causes problems for EPICS.

This should be fairly easy to fix; I’ll work on this and then release a new tagged version of the Lambda library.

Now that I look at it, the current version of the library should also ignore this .txt file; I’ll need to test out a detector to double-check this, but this probably isn’t directly the problem.

When I looked at my local copy of the configuration files for the module, I found that in the “lookups” folder there was a subfolder called “SiLookups”, in addition to the proper configuration files:
correction_si_1556_516.int32 nominator_si_1556_516.int32
Module_2019-006_Si_timing.txt pixelmask_si_1556_516.uint32
SiLookups

This was probably the result of a mistake with linux commands, e.g. copying an entire folder rather than its contents. If you look at your config files, is there this additional SiLookups subfolder within the lookups folder? If so, then you should delete the SiLookups subfolder; this might be causing the problem.

Also, can you let me know which tagged version of liblambda you’re using? It might be that the functionality to use this timing file isn’t included in the library version you’re using. Tagged version v0.10.3_60k should be OK (though I will test this out later today to make sure)."

[antoninomiceli]

@keenanlang says:

Okay, I don't know what tag specifically the IOC was built with, but the source file for the config reader doesn't ignore the timing file, so that's definitely the issue with EPICS. There is another version of the liblambda library built in the home directory that does have the new code to properly handle that file, which is likely the version that the vendor software is using.

I'll work on updating the library and rebuild the IOC.

I was a little confused when I built the IOC after updating the support library, it didn't seem to recognize that the library was rebuilt. I thought it might be due to shared libraries being able to be updated without source code being changed, but it looks like something likely went wrong. I just got finished with being at Sector 6 all day, I tried to login to the lambda computer, but it seems to be down. I can look at what went wrong on Monday.