I went into /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/target/daqd, opened the master file, and uncommented the line with C0EDCU.ini (this is the file in which all the slow machine channels are defined). So now I am able to access, for example, the c1vac1 channels.

The location of the master file is no longer in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/target/fb, but is in the above mentioned directory instead. This is part of the new daqd paradigm in which separate processes are handling the data transfer between FEs and FB, and the actual frame-writing. Jamie will explain this more when he summarizes the CDS revamp.

It looks like trend data is also available for these newly enabled channels, but thus far, I've only checked second trends. I will update with a more exhaustive check later in the evening.

So, the two major pending problems (that I can think of) are:

1. Inability to unload models cleanly
2. Inability of dataviewer (and cdsutils) to open testpoints.

Apart from this, dataviewer frequently hangs on Donatella at startup. I used ipcs -a | grep 0x | awk '{printf( "-Q %s ", $1 )}' | xargs ipcrm to remove all the extra messages in the dataviewer queue.

Restarting the daqd processes on fb1 using Jamie's instructions from earlier in this thread works - but the mx_stream processes do not seem to come back automatically on c1lsc, c1sus and c1ioo (reasons unknown). I've made a copy of the mxstreamrestart.sh script with the new mxstream restart commands, called mxstreamrestart_debian.sh, which lives in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/cds. I've also modified the CDS overview MEDM screen such that the "mxstream restart" calls this modified script. For now, this requires you to enter the controls password for each machine. I don't know what is a secure way to do it otherwise, but I recall not having to do this in the past with the old mxstreamrestart.sh script.

I have squished cables in all the places I can think of - but MC1 has been glitching regularly today. Before starting to pull electronics out, I am going to attempt a more systematic debugging in the hope I can localize the cause.

To this end, I've disabled the MC autolocker, and have shutdown the MC1 watchdog. I plan to leave it in this state overnight. From this, I hope to look at the free-swinging optic spectra to see that this isn't a symptom of something funky with the suspension itself.

Some possible scenarios (assuming the free swinging spectra look alright and the various resonances are where we expect them to be):

1. With the watchdog shutdown, the PIT/YAW bias voltages still goto the coil (low-passed by 4 poles @1Hz). So if the glitching happens in this path, we should see it in both the shadow sensors and the DC spot positions on the WFS.
2. If the glitching happens in the shadow sensor readout electronics/cabling, we should see it in the shadow sensor channels, but NOT in the DC spot positions on the WFS (as the watchdog is shutdown, so there should be no actuation to the coils based on OSEM signals).
3. If we don't see any glitches in WFS spot positions or shadow sensors, then it is indicative of the problem being in the coil driver board / dewhitening board/anti-aliasing board.
4. I am discounting the problem being in the Satellite box, as we have switched around the MC1 satellite box multiple times - the glitches remain on MC1 and don't follow a Satellite Box. Of course there is the possibility that the cabling from 1X5/1X6 to the Satellite box is bad.

MC1 has been in a glitchy mood today, with large (MC-REFL spot shifts by ~1 beam diameter on the CCD monitor) glitches happening ~every 2-3 hours. Hopefully it hasn't gone into an extended quiet period. For reference, I've attached the screen-grab of the MC-QUAD and MC-REFL as they are now.

GV 9.20PM: Just to make sure of good SNR in measuring the pendulum eigenfreqs, I ran /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/SUS/freeswing MC1 in a terminal . The result looked rather violent on the camera but its already settling down. The terminal output:

Seems like something has failed after I did this - full frames are no longer on Aug 10 being written since ~2.30pm PDT. I found out when I tried to download some of the free-swinging MC1 data.

To clarify, I logged into fb1, and ran sudo systemctl restart daqd_*. The only change I made was to uncomment the line quoted below in the master file.

Looking at the log using systemctl, I see the following (I just tried restarting the daqd processes again):

Oddly, I am able to access second trends for the same channels from the past which will be useful for the MC1 debugging). Not sure whats going on.

The live data grabbing using cdsutils still seems to be working though - so I've kicked MC1 again, and am grabbing 2 hours of data live on Pianosa.

I commented out the line pertaining to C0EDCU again, now full frames are being written again.

But we no longer have access to the slow EPICS records.

I am not sure what the failure mode is here - In the master file, there is a line that says the EDCU list "*MUST* COME *AFTER* ALL OTHER FAST INI DEFINITIONS" which it does. But there are a bunch of lines that are testpoint lists after this EDCU line. I wonder if that is the problem?

Attachment #1: Free swinging sensor spectra. I havent done any peak fitting but the locations of the resonances seem consistent with where we expect them to be.

The MC_REFL spot appears to not have shifted significantly (so slow bias voltages are probably not to blame). Now I have to look at trend data to see if there is any evidence of glitching.

I'm not sure I understand the input matrix though - the matrix elements would have me believe that the sensing of POS in UL is ~5x stronger than in UR and LL, but the peak heights don't back that up.

Attachment #3: Second trend over 5hours (since frame writing was re-enabled this morning). Note that MC1 is still free-swinging but there is no evidence of steps of ~30cts which have been observed some days ago. Also, from my observations yesterday, MC1 glitched multiple times over a few hours timescale. More data will have to be looked at, but as things stand, Hypothesis #3 below looks the best.

About 30mins ago, I saw another glitch on MC1 - this happened while the Watchdog was shutdown.

In order to further narrow down the cause of the glitch, we switched the Coil Driver Board --> Satellite box DB(15?) connectors on the coil drivers between MC1 and MC3 coil driver boards. I also changed the static PIT/YAW bias voltages to MC1 and MC3 such that MC-REFL is now approximately back to the center of the CCD monitor.

So we tried this again with a fresh build of daqd_fw, and it still fails.  The error message is pointing to an underlying bug in the framecpp library ("LDASTools"), which may be tricky to solve.  I'm rustling the appropriate bushes...

Even in the switched state, the glitches stayed on MC1.

The coil driver electronics for MC1, upstream of the Satellite box, was what was previously MC3 electronics.

Attachment #1 shows that there were no glitches in MC3 sensor channels (which are now physically connected to what was previously MC1 coil driver electronics).

Attachment #2 shows the second trends for a 12 hour period for MC1 and MC3 sensor channels. The MC3 channels look well behaved, but there are frequent glitches (at least 9 in the last 12 hours ) visible in the MC1 channels.

So to recap:

• We switched MC1 satellite box - but glitch stayed on MC1, so it would seem the Satellite box is not to blame.
• We shutdown the watchdog and the glitches persisted.
• We switched the coil driver electronics for MC1, but glitches remained on MC1, and MC3 doesn't show any evidence of glitching. This and the previous bullet point suggest the coil driver electronics are not to blame.
• For the glitch posted in Attachment #1, I could see the MC-REFL spot moving around on the CCD monitors, so the glitches aren't just a feature in the shadow sensor readout. 

I need to confirm that the output of the coil driver board goes straight to the Sat. Box, but if there are no intermediate elements, the problem is either in the cable from coil driver to sat. box, or downstream of the Satellite box - i.e. vacuum feedthroughs or the suspension itself? The size of the glitches is roughly the same in all 4 face channels (~60-80cts pp).

GV addendum 14 Aug 2017, 10.30am: Attachment #3 shows the second trend for the MC sensor channels over the weekend. While there were many on Saturday, it seems that Sunday was quieter.

Today, I borrowed the fiber microscope from Johannes and took a look at the fibers coupled to the PDs. The PD labelled "BEAT PD AUX Y" has an end that seems scratched (Attachments #1 and #2). The scratch seems to be on (or at least very close to) the core. The other PD (Attachments #3 and #4) doesn't look very clean either, but at least the area near the core seems undamaged. The two attachments for each PD corresponds to the two available lighting settings on the fiber microscope.

I have not attempted to clean them yet, though I have also borrowed the cleaning supplies to facilitate this from Johannes. I also plan to inspect the ends of all other fiber connections before re-installing them.

I don't think we can say for sure. I was just talking to EricQ about this, he said the glitches were often seen when changing the alignment offsets when aligning the arm. I am pretty sure I have seen the ETMX alignment change abruptly since the Ruby Standoff replacement (the Oplev spot just slides across the MEDM display rapidly), but I can't find an elog where I've put in details. I also haven't done a whole lot of work with the arm cavities where I would have noticed this problem. There is this test that Eric did, and it didn't throw up any red flags. But the suspension can be well behaved for weeks at a time before this problem pops up again.

There was also the flaky power connection to the timing card on the ETMX expansion chassis which was fixed only recently, after which there has been no systematic investigation of the status of ETMX.

If it is true that these events are caused by strain building up in the suspension wire, I wonder how we can take systematic steps to avoid it. From what I remember of the SOS assembly procedure, the (unglued) standoff is slid along the optic with the wire under slight tension until the wire slips into the groove on the standoff. Then the tension in the wire is adjusted till the optic is pitch balanced and at the desired height. But it is easy to imagine imprinting some torsional stresses in the (40 um?) wire during this process of looping it around under the optic and placing it in the groove. But perhaps this mechanism makes a negligible contribution to the effect we are seeing, and some other mechanism is responsible in this case.

[johannes, gautam, jamie]

• Made a directory /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/Acromag/PSL where I copied over the files needed my modbusApp to start the server from Lydia's user directory
• Edited /ligo/apps/ubuntu12/ligoapps-user-env.sh to export a couple of EPICS variables to facilitate easy startup of the EPICS server
• Started a tmux session on (soon to be re-christened?) megatron called "acroEPICS"
• Ran the following command to start up the EPICS server:

To do:

1. Make a startup script that runs the above command - eventually this can contain the initialization instructions for all the Acromags
2. Figure out the initctl/systemctl stuff to make the server automatically restart if it drops for some reason (e.g. power failure)

Now that all the CDS overview lights are green, I decided to switch back the coil driver outputs to their original state so that the MC optics could be damped and the IMC relocked. I also restored the static PIT/YAW bias values to their original values.

MC1 has been quiet over the last couple of days, lets see how it behaves in the next few days. In all the glitches I have observed, if the IMC is locked and WFS loops are enabled, the loops are able to correct for the DC misalignment caused by the glitch. But the mcwfs off script is currently set up in such a way that the output history is cleared between IMC locks. I made two copies of the mcwfson/mcwfsoff scripts, called mcwfsunhold/mcwfshold respectively. They live in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/MC/WFS. I've also modified the autolocker script to call these modified scripts, such that when the IMC loses lock, the WFS servo outputs are held, while the input is turned off. The hope is that in this configuration, the autolocker can catch a lock even if there is a glitch on MC1.

I haven't tried locking the arms yet, but I think other IFO work discussed at the meeting (like arm loss estimation / cavity scans etc) can proceed.

I'm not sure if this has something to do with the model restarts / new RCG, but while I was re-enabling the MC watchdogs, I noticed the RMS sensor voltage channels on ITMX hovering around ~100mV, even though local damping was on (in which configuration I would expect <1mV if everything is working normally).  I was confused by this behaviour, and after staring at the ITMX suspension screen for a while, I noticed that the input to the "ASCP" and "ASCY" servos were "-nan", and the outputs were 10^20 cts  (see Attachment #1).

Digging a little deeper, I found that the same problem existed on ITMY, ETMX, ETMY, PRM (but not BS or SRM) - reasons unknown for now.

I have to check where this signal is coming from, but for now I just turned the "ASC Input" switch off. More investigation to be done, but in the meantime, ASS dither alignment may not be possible.

After consulting with Jamie, I have just disabled all outputs to the suspensions other than local damping loop outputs. I need to figure out how to get this configuration into the safe.snap file such that until we are sure of what is going on, the models start up in this safer configuration.

gedit 28 Oct 0026: Seems like this problem is seen at the sites as well. I wonder if the problem is related.

Today, with Johannes' help, I cleaned the fiber tips of the photodiodes. The effect of the cleaning was dramatic - see Attachments #1-4, which are X Beat PD, axial illumination, X Beat PD, oblique illumination, Y beat PD, axial illumination, Y beat PD, oblique illumination. They look much cleaner now, and the feature that looked like a scratch has vanished.

The cleaning procedure followed was:

• Blow clean air over the fiber tip
• First, we tried cleaning with the Q-tip like tool, but the results weren't great. The way to use it is to dip the tip in the cleaning solvent for a few seconds, hold the tip to the fiber taking into account the angled cut, and apply 10 gentle quarter turns.
• Next, we tried cleaning with the wipes. We peeled out an approximately 5" section of the wipe, and laid it out on the table. We then applied cleaning solvent liberally on the central area where we were sure we hadn't touched the wipe. Then you just drag the fiber tip along the soaked part of the wipe. If you get the angle exactly right, the fiber glides smoothly along the surface, but if you are a little misaligned, you get a scratchy sensation. 
• Blow dry and inspect.

I will repeat this procedure for all fiber connections once I start putting the box back together - I'm almost done with the new box, just waiting on some hardware to arrive.

Seems like this modification didn't really work. There were several large MC1 glitches, and one of them misaligned MC1 so much that the IMC didn't relock for the last ~6 hours. I re-aligned MC1 manually, and now it is locked fine.

that's why the Autolocker clears the outputs; we don't want to be holding the offsets from the last ms of lock when it was all messed up; instead it would be best to have a slow (~mHz) relief script that takes the WFS controls and puts them onto the MC SUS sliders. This would then re-align the MC to the input beam rather than the input to the MC. Which is not the best idea.

I spent some time today trying to debug this issue.

Jamie and I had opened up the c1sus frontend to try and replace the RFM card before we realized that the problem was in the RCG code generator. During this process, we had disconnected all of the back-panel cabling to this machine (2 ethernet cables, dolphin cable, and RFM cables/fibers). I thought I may have accidentally returned the cables to the wrong positions - but all the status indicator lights indicate that everything is working as it should, and I also confirmed that the cabling is as it is in the pictures of the rack on the wiki page.

Looking at the SimuLink model diagram (see Attachment #1 for example), it looks like (at least some of) these channels are actually on the dolphin network, and not the RFM network (with which we were experiencing problems). This suggests that the problem is something deeper. Although I did see nans in some of the ETMX ASC channels as well, for which the channels are piped over the RFM network. Even more puzzling is that the ASC MEDM screen (Attachment #3) and the SimuLink diagram (Attachment #2) suggest that there is an output matrix in between the input signals and the output angular control signals to the suspensions. As Attachment #4 shows, the rows corresponding to ITMX PIT and YAW are zero (I confirmed using z read <matrixElement>). Attachment #3 shows that the output of all the servo banks except CARM_YAW is zero, but CARM_YAW has no matrix element going to the ITMs (also confirmed with z read <servoOutputChannel>). So 0 x 0 should be 0, but for some reason the model doesn't give this output?

GV Edit: As EricQ just pointed out to me, nan x 0 is still nan, which probably explains the whole issue. Poking a little further, it seems like this is an SDF issue - the SDF table isn't able to catch differences for this hold output channel.

As I was writing this elog, I noticed that, as mentioned above, the CARM_YAW output was "nan". When I restart the model (thankfully this didn't crash c1lsc!), it seems to default to this state. Opening up the filter module, I saw that the "hold output" was enabled.

Toggling that switch made the nans in all the SUS ASC channels disappear. Mysterious .

All the points above stand - CARM_YAW output shouldn't have been going anywhere as per the output matrix, but it seems to have been responsible? Seems like a bug in any case if a model restarts with a field as "nan".

Anyways the problem seems to have been resolved so I'm going to try locking and dither aligning the arms now.

Rolf mentioned that a simple update could fix several of the CDS issues we are facing (e.g. inability to open up testpoints), but he didn't seem to have any insight into this particular issue. Jamie will try and recompile all the models and then we have to see if that fixes the remaining problems.

[ericq, gautam]

• I was just getting the IFO aligned, and single arm lock going, when EricQ came in and asked if we could get some ALS data.
• ALS beats seemed fine, in particular the X-Arm. The broad hump around ~70Hz that was present in my previous ALS update was nowhere to be seen - reasons unknown.
• Copied over /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/YARM/Lock_ALS_YARM.py to /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/XARM/Lock_ALS_XARM.py. Could be useful when we want to do arm cavity scans.
• Made appropriate changes to allow ALS locking of Xarm - the testpoint inaccessibility makes things a little annoying but for tonight we just used DQ channels in place (or slow channels when DQ chans were not available)
• Calibration of X arm error signal seemed off - so we fixed it by driving a line in ETMX and matching up the peaks in the ALS error signal and POX11. We then updated the gain of the filter in the CINV filter bank accordingly.
• Got some decent data - X arm stayed locked on ALS for >60mins, during which time the Y arm stayed locked on POY11, and the Y green also reained locked . There was no evidence of the X arm 00 mode randomly dropping out of lock tonight.
• EQ will update with a sick comparison plot - today we looked at the ALS noise from the perspective of the Green Locking Izumi et. al. paper.
• Y arm ALS noise didn't look so hot tonight - to be investigated...

Leaving LSC mode OFF for now while CDS is still under investigation

Not really related to this work: We saw that the safe.snap file for c1oaf seems to have gotten overwritten at some point. I restored the EPICS values from a known good time, and over-wrote the safe.snap file.

[gautam, steve]

In the aftermath of the accidental vent, it looks like the RGA was shutdown.

We followed the instructions in this elog to restart the RGA.

Seems to be working now, Steve says we just need to wait for it to warm up before we can collect a reliable scan.

[steve, gautam]

At Rolf/Rich Abbott's request, we performed a check of the UPS today.

Steve believed that the UPS was functioning as it should, and the recent accidental vent was because the UPS batteries were insufficiently charged when the test was performed. Today, we decided to try testing the UPS.

We first closed V1, VM1 and VA6 using the MEDM screen. We prepared to pull power on all these valves by loosening the power connections (but not detaching them). [During this process, I lost the screw holding the power cord fixed to the gate valve V1 - we are looking for a replacement right now but it seems to be an odd size. It is cable tied for now.]

The battery charge indicator LEDs on the UPS indicated that the batteries were fully charged.

Next, we hit the "Test" button on the UPS - it has to be held down for ~3 seconds for the test to be actually initiated, seems to be a safety feature of the UPS. Once the test is underway, the LED indicators on the UPS will indicate that the loading is on the UPS batteries. The test itself lasts for ~5seconds, after which the UPS automatically reverts to the nominal configuration of supplying power from the main line (no additional user input is required).

In this test, one of the five battery charge indicator LEDs went off (5 ON LEDs indicate full charge).

So on the basis of this test, it would seem that the UPS is functioning as expected. It remains to be investigated if the various hardware/software interlocks in place will initiate the right sequence of valve closures when required.

In case you want to use it, I had profiled the Lightwave NPRO sometime back, and we were even using it as the AUX X laser for a short period of time. 

As for using the AS laser for mode spectroscopy: don't we want to match the beam into the cavity as best as possible, and then use some technique to disturb the input mode (like the dental tooth scraper technique from Chris Mueller's thesis)? 

Johannes and I did an arm scan of the X arm today (arm controlled with ALS, monitoring IR transmission) - only 2 IR FSRs were scanned, but there should be sufficient information in there to extract the modulation depth and mode matching - can we use Kaustubh's/Naomi's code?. The Y arm ALS needs to be touched up so I don't have a Y arm scan yet. Note that to get a good arm scan measurement, the High Gain Thorlabs PD should be used as the transmission PD.

I worked a little bit on the Y arm ALS today. 

• Started by locking the Y arm to IR with POY, and then ran the dither alignment script to maximize Y arm transmission.
• Green TRY DC monitor was around 0.16, whereas I have seen ~0.45 when we were doing DRFPMI locking.
• So I went to the Y end table and tweaked the steering mirrors a little. I was able to get GTRY to ~0.42. I think this can be tweaked a little further but I decided to push on for tonight.
• The beat amplitude on the network analyzer in the control room is comparable to the X arm beat now.
• Adjusted the gain of the phase tracker servos, cleared phase history.
• Looking at the ALS beat noise with the arms locked to IR and the slow ALS temperature control loops ON (see Attachment #1), the current measurements line up quite well with the reference traces.

I am now going to measure the OLTFs of both green PDH loops to check that the overall loop gain is okay, and also check the measurement against EricQ's LISO model of the (modified) AUX green PDH servos. Results to follow.

Some weeks ago, I had moved some of the Green steering optics on the PSL table around, in order to flip some mirror mounts and try and get angles of incidence closer to ~45deg on some of the steering mirrors. As a result of this work, I can see some light on the GTRY CCD when the X green shutter is open. It is unclear if there is also some scattered light on the RFPDs. I will post pictures + a more detailed investigation of the situation on the PSL table later, there are multiple stray green beams on the PSL table which should probably be dumped.

As I was writing this elog, I saw the X green lock drop abruptly. During this time, the X arm stayed locked to the IR, and the Y arm beat on the control room network analyzer did not jump (at least not by an amount visible to the eye). Toggling the X end shutter a few times, the green TEM00 lock was re-acquired, but the beatnote has moved on the control room analyzer by ~40MHz. On Friday evening however, the X green lock held for >1 hour. Need to keep an eye on this.

Attachment #1 shows the results of my measurements tonight (SR785 data in Attachment #2). Both loops have a UGF of ~10kHz, with ~55 degrees of phase margin.

Excitation was injected via SR560 at the PDH error point, amplitude was 35mV. According to the LED indicators on these boxes, the low frequency boost stages were ON. Gain knob of the X end PDH box was at 6.5, that of the Y end PDH box was at 4.9. I need to check the schematics to interpret these numbers. GV Edit: According to this elog, these numbers mean that the overall gain of the X end PDH box is approx. 25dB, while that of the Y end PDH box is approx. 15dB. I believe the Y end Lightwave NPRO has an actuator discriminant ~5MHz/V, while the X end Innolight is more like 1MHz/V.

Not sure what to make of the X PDH loop measurement being so much noisier than the Y end, I need to think about this.

More detailed analysis to follow.

[jamie, gautam]

I had some trouble getting the daqd processes up and running again using Jamie's instructions.

With Jamie's help however, they are back up and running now. The problem was that the mx infrastructure didn't come back up on its own. So prior to running sudo systemctl restart daqd_*, Jamie ran sudo systemctl start mx. This seems to have done the trick.

c1iscey was still showing red fields on the CDS overview screen so Jamie did a soft reboot. The machine came back up cleanly, so I restarted all the models. But the indicator lights were still red. Apparently the mx processes weren't running on c1iscey. The way to fix this is to run sudo systemctl start mx_stream. Now everything is green.

Now we are going to work on trying the fix Rolf suggested on c1iscex.

[jamie, gautam]

We tried to implement the fix that Rolf suggested in order to solve (perhaps among other things) the inability of some utilities like dataviewer to open testpoints. The problem isn't wholly solved yet - we can access actual testpoint data (not just zeros, as was the case) using DTT, and if DTT is used to open a testpoint first, then dataviewer, but DV itself can't seem to open testpoints.

Here is what was done (Jamie will correct me if I am mistaken).

1. Jamie checked out branch 3.4 of the RCG from the SVN.
2. Jamie recompiled all the models on c1iscex against this version of RCG.
3. I shutdown ETMX watchdog, then ran rtcds stop all on c1iscex to stop all the models, and then restarted them using rtcds start <model> in the order c1x01, c1scx and c1asx. 
4. Models came back up cleanly. I then restarted the daqd_dc process on FB1. At this point all indicators on the CDS overview screen were green.
5. Tried getting testpoint data with DTT and DV for ETMX Oplev Pitch and Yaw IN1 testpoints. Conclusion as above.

So while we are in a better state now, the problem isn't fully solved. 

Comment: seems like there is an in-built timeout for testpoints opened with DTT - if the measurement is inactive for some time (unsure how much exactly but something like 5mins), the testpoint is automatically closed.

After getting the go ahead from Jamie, I recompiled all the FE models against the same version of RCG that we tested on the c1iscex models.

To do so:

• I did rtcds make and rtcds install for all the models.
• Then I ssh-ed into the FEs and did rtcds stop all, followed by rtcds start <model> in the order they are listed on the CDS overview MEDM screen (top to bottom).
• During the compilation process (i.e. rtcds make), for some of the models, I got some compilation warnings. I believe these are related to models that have custom C code blocks in them. Jamie tells me that it is okay to ignore these warnings at that they will be fixed at some point.
• c1lsc FE crashed when I ran rtcds stop all - had to go and do a manual reboot.
• Doing so took down the models on c1sus and c1ioo that were running - but these FEs themselves did not have to be robooted.
• Once c1lsc came back up, I restarted all the models on the vertex FEs. They all came back online fine.
• Then I ssh-ed into FB1, and restarted the daqd processes - but c1lsc and c1ioo CDS indicators were still red.
• Looks like the mx_stream processes weren't started automatically on these two machines. Reasons unknown. Earlier today, the same was observed for c1iscey.
• I manually restarted the mx_stream processes, at which point all CDS indicator lights became green (see Attachment #1).

IFO alignment needs to be redone, but at least we now have a (admittedly rounabout way) of getting testpoints. Did a quick check for "nan-s" on the ASC screen, saw none. So I am re-enabling watchdogs for all optics.

GV 23 August 9am: Last night, I re-aligned the TMs for single arm locks. Before the model restarts, I had saved the good alignment on the EPICs sliders, but the gain of x3 on the coil driver filter banks have to be manually turned on at the moment (i.e. the safe.snap file has them off). ALS noise looked good for both arms, so just for fun, I tried transitioning control of both arms to ALS (in the CARM/DARM basis as we do when we lock DRFPMI, using the Transition_IR_ALS.py script), and was successful.

I completed the revamp of the box, and re-installed the box on the PSL table today. I think it would be ideal to install this on one of the electronic racks, perhaps 1X2 would be best. We would have to re-route the fibers from the PSL table to 1X2, but I think they have sufficient length, and this way, the whole arrangement is much cleaner.

Did a quick check to make sure I could see beat notes for both arms. I will now attempt to measure the ALS noise with this revamped box, to see if the improved power supply and grounding arrangement, as well as fiber cleaning, has had any effect.

Photos + power budget + plan of action for using this box to characterize the green PDH locking to follow. 

For quick reference: here is the AM/PM measurement done when we re-installed the repaired Innolight NPRO on the new X endtable.

Since the single arm locking and dither alignment seemed to work alright after the CDS overhaul, I decided to try some recycling cavity locking tonight.

• First, I locked single arms, ran dither alignment servos, and centered all test mass Oplevs. Note: the X arm dither alignment doesn't seem to work if we use the High-Gain Thorlabs PD as the Transmission PD. The BS loops just seem to pick up large offsets and the alignment actually degrades over a couple of minutes. This needs to be investigated.
• Next, to get good PRM alignment, I manually moved the EPICS sliders till the REFL spot became roughly centered on the CCD screen.
• Then I tried locking PRMI on carrier using the usual C1IFOConfigure script - the lock was caught within ~30 seconds.
• The PRCL and MICH dither servo scripts also ran fine.
  • Centered PRM Oplev.
• Next, I tried enabling the PRC angular feedforward.
  • OAF model does not automatically revert to its safe.snap configuration on model reboot, so I first manually did this such that the correct filter banks were enabled.
  • I was able to turn on the angular feedforward without disturbing the PRMI carrier lock. The angular motion of the POP spot on the CCD monitor was visibly reduced.
• At this point I decided to try DRMI locking.
  • I centered the beam on the AS PDs with the simple Michelson.
  • Centered the beam on the REFL PDs with PRM aligned and PRC flashing through resonances.
  • Restored SRM alignment by eye with EPICS sliders.
  • Cavity alignment seemed alright - so I tried to lock DRMI with the old settings (i.e. from DRMI 1f locking a couple of months ago). But I had no success.
  • The behaviour of REFL55 (used for SRCL control) has changed dramatically - the analog whitening gain for this PD used to be +18dB, but at this setting, there are frequent ADC overflows. I had to reduce the whitening gain to +6dB to stop the ADC overflows. I also checked to make sure that the whitening setting was "manual" and not triggered.

Why should this have changed? I was just on the AS table and did re-center the beam onto the REFL 55 RFPD, but I had also done this in April/May when I was last doing DRMI locking. But I can't explain the apparent factor of ~4 increase in light level. I think I have some measurements of the light levels at various PDs from April 2017, I will see how the present levels line up.

Of course dataviever won't cooperate when I am trying to monitor testpoints.

I may be missing something obvious, but I am quitting for tonight, will look into this more tomorrow.

Unrelated to this work: looking at the GTRY spot on the CCD monitor, there seems to be some excess angular motion. Not sure where this is coming from. In the past, this sort of problem has been symptomatic of something going wonky with the Oplev loops. But I took loop measurements for ITMY and ETMY PIT and YAW, they look normal. I will investigate further when I am doing some more ALS work.

A couple of weeks ago, I was trying to modernize the python version of the FSS Slow temperature control loops, when I accidentally ended up deleting it . There was no svn backup. So the old Perl PID script has been running for the last few days.

Today, I checked out the latest version that Andrew and co. have running in the PSL lab. I had to make some important modifications for the script to work for the 40m setup.

1. The script is conveniently setup in a way that the channels it needs to read from / write to are read in from an .ini file. I renamed all the channels to match the appropriate 40m ones.
2. We don't have a soft epics channel in which to define the setpoint for our PID servo (which is 0). Rather than poke around with slow machine EPICS records, I simply commented out this line in the script and included the hard-coded value of 0. When we modernize to the Acromag era, we can setup an EPICS channel + MEDM slider for the setpoint.
3. The way the Perl script was setup, the error signal was pre-scaled by a factor of 0.01, supposedly to make the PID gains be of order 1. For consistency, I re-inserted this scaling, which awade and co. had removed.
4. Modified the FSSslowPy.init file to call the script in accordance with the new syntax:

Then I stopped the Perl process on megatron by running

and started the Python process by running

I have now committed the files FSSSlow.py and FSSSlowPy.ini to the 40m svn.  Things seem to be stable for the last 20 mins or so, let's keep an eye on this though - although we had been running the Python PID loop for some months, this version is a slightly modified one. 

The initctl stuff still isn't very robust - I think both the Autolocker and the FSS slow servos have to be manually restarted if megatron is shutdown/restarted for whatever reason. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the initctl routine itself - looking at the logs, I can see that init is trying to start both processes, but is failing to do so each time. To be investigated. The wiki procedure to restart this process is up to date.

GV Edit 0000 25 Aug 2017: I had to add a line to the script that checks MC transmission before enabling the PID loop. Change has been committed to svn. Now, when the MC loses lock or if the PSL shutter is kept closed for an extended period of time, the temperature loop doesn't rail.

I tried some DRMI locking again tonight, but had no success. Here is the story.

• I started out by going to the AS table and measuring the light level on the REFL55 photodiode (with PRM aligned and the PRC flashing, but LSC disabled).
  • The Ophir power meter reads 13mW
  • The DC output of the photodiode shows ~500mV on an oscilloscope.
  • Both of these numbers line up well with measurements I made in April/May.
• Returned to the control room and aligned the IFO for DRMI locking - but LSC servos remained disabled.
  • At the nominal REFL55 whitening level of +18dB, the REFL 55 signals saturated the ADC (confirmed by looking at the traces on dataviewer).
  • But the signals still looked like PDH error signals.
  • Lowering the whitening gain to 6dB makes the PDH error signal horns peak around 20,000 counts.
  • Could this be indicative of problems with either the analog whitening gain switching or the LSC Demod Boards? To be investigated.
• Tried enabling LSC servos with same settings with which I had success right up till a couple of months ago, but had no success.
  • If it is true that the REFL55 signal is getting amplified because of some gain stage not being switched correctly, I should still have been able to lock the SRC with a lowered loop gain - but even lowering the gain by a factor of 10 had no effect on the locking success rate.

Looks like I will have to embark on the REFL55 LSC electronics investigation. I was able to successfully lock the PRC on carrier and sideband, and the Michelson lock also seems to work fine, all of which seem to point to a hardware problem with the REFL55 signal chain.

I did a quick check by switching the output of the REFL55 demod board to the inputs normally used by AS55 signals on the whitening board. Setting the whitening gain to +18dB for these channels had the same effect - ADC overflow galore. So looks like the whitening board isn't to blame. I will have to check the demod board out.

Looks like MC1 got another big kick just under 4 hours ago. None of the other optics show any evidence of a glitch so it seems unlikely that this was some sort of global event. It's been well behaved for ~2weeks now. IMC was unlocked. I manually re-aligned MC1, at which point the autolocker was able to lock the IMC.

Looking at this plot, it seems that LR and UL coils seem to have the largest kicks. UR barely saw it. Not sure what (if anything) to make of this - apparently the optic moved by ~20urad with the UR magnet approximately the pivot.

[Kira, gautam]

Attachment #1 - Photo of the revamped beat setup. The top panel has to be installed. New features include:

• Regulated power supply via D1000217.
• Single power switch for both PDs.
• Power indicator LED.
• Chassis ground isolated from all other electronic grounds. For this purpose, I installed all the elctronics on a metal plate which is only connected to the chassis via nylon screws. The TO220 package power regulator ICs have been mounted with the TO220 mounting kits that provide a thin piece of plastic that electrically insulates its ground from the chassis ground.
• PD outputs routed through 20dB coupler on front panel for diagnostic purposes.
• Fiber routing has been cleaned up a little. I installed a winding fixture I got from Johannes, but perhaps we can install another one of these on top of the existing one to neaten up the fiber layout further.
• 90-10 light splitter (meant for diagnostic purposes) has been removed because of space constraints. 

Attachment #2 - Power budget inside the box. Some of these FC/APC connectors seem to not offer good coupling between the two fibers. Specifically, the one on the front panel meant to accept the PSL light input fiber seems particularly bad. Right now, the PSL light is entering the box through one of the front panel connectors marked "PSL + X out". I've also indicated the beat amplitude measured with an RF analyzer. Need to do the math now to confirm if these match the expected amplitudes based on the power levels measured.

Attachment #3 - We repeated the measurement detailed here. The X arm (locked to IR) was used for this test. The "X" delay line electronics were connected to the X green beat PD, while the "Y" delay line electronics were connected to the X IR beat PD. I divided the phase tracker Hz calibration factor by 2 to get IR Hz for the Y arm channels. IR beat was at ~38MHz, green beat was at ~76MHz. The broadband excess noise seen in the previous test is no longer present. Indeed, below ~20Hz, the IR beat seems less noisy. So seems like the cleaning / electronics revamp did some good. 

Further characterization needs to be done, but the results of this test are encouraging. If we are able to get this kind of out of loop ALS noise with the IR beat, perhaps we can avoid having to frequently fine-tune the green beat alignment on the PSL table. It would also be ideal to mount this whole 1U setup in an electronics rack instead of leaving it on the PSL table.

GV Edit: I've added better photos to the 40m Google Photos page. I've also started a wiki page for this box / the proposed IR ALS  system. For the moment, all that is there is the datasheet to the Fiber Couplers used, I will populate this more as I further characterize the setup.

This elog is meant to summarize the current backup situation of critical 40m files.

What are the critical filesystems? I've also indicated the size of these disks and the volume currently used, and the current backup situation. 

Then there is Optimus, but I don't think there is anything critical on it. 

So, based on my understanding, we need to back up a whole bunch of stuff, particularly the boot disks and root filesystems for Chiara, Megatron and Nodus. We should also test that the backups we make are useful (i.e. we can recover current operating state in the event of a disk failure).

Please edit this elog if I have made a mistake. I also don't have any idea about whether there is any sort of backup for the slow computing system code.

[ericq, gautam]

Tonight, we decided to double-check the POX counts-to-meters conversion.

It is unclear when this was last done, and since I modified the coil driver electronics for the ITMs and BS recently, I figured it would be useful to get this calibration done. The primary motivation was to see if we could resolve the discrepancy between the current ALS noise (using POX as a sensor) compared to the Izumi et. al. plot.

Because we are planning to change the coil driver electronics further soon anyways, we decided to do the calibration at a single frequency for tonight. For future reference, the extension of this method to calibrate the actuator over a wider range of frequencies is here. The procedure followed, and the relevant numbers from tonight, are as follows.

Procedure:

1. Set dark offsets on all DCPDs and LSC PDs.
2. Look at the free swinging Michelson signal on ASDC.
   • For tonights test, ASDC was derived from the AS55 photodiode.
   • The AS110 photodiode actually has more light on it, but we think that the ADC that the DCPD board is interfaced to is running on 0-2V rather than 0-10V, as the signal seemed to saturate around 2000 counts. It is unclear whether the actual photodiode is saturating, to be investigated.
   • So we decided to use ASDC from AS55 photodiode with 15dB whitening gain.
   • There is also some issue with the whitening filter (not whitening gain) on ASDC - engaging the whitening shifts the DC offset. This has to be investigated while we get stuck into the LSC electronics.
3. Look at the peak-to-peak swing of ASDC. Use algebraic expression for reflected power from Michelson interferometer to calibrate the ASDC slope at Michelson half-fringe. For the test tonight, ASDC_max = 1026 counts, ASDC_min = 2 counts.
4. Lock the Michelson at half-fringe, with ASDC as the error signal.
   • Zero out the MICH elements in the RFPD input matrix.
   • Set the matrix element from ASDC to MICH in the DCPD LSC input matrix to 1.
   • The servo gain used was +0.005 on the MICH_A servo path.
   • A low-frequency boost was turned on.
5. Use the sensing matrix infrastructure to drive a line in the optic of interest.
   • Tonight, we looked at ITMX and ITMY.
   • The line was driven at 311.1Hz, and the amplitude was 300 counts.
   • Download 60secs of ASDC data, demodulate at the driven frequency to find the peak height in counts, and using the slope of ASDC (in cts/m) at the Michelson half-fringe, calculate the actuator gain in m/cts.
   • ITMY: 2.55e-9 / f^2 m/count
   • ITMX: 2.65e-9 / f^2 m/count
   • These numbers kind of make sense - the previous numbers were ~5nm/f^2 /ct, but I removed an analog gain of x3 in this path. Presumably there has been some change in the N/A conversion factor - perhaps because of a change in the interaction between the optics' face magnets and the static magnetic field in the OSEMs?
6. Lock the arms with POX/POY, and drive the newly calibrated ITMs.
   • So we know how many meters we are driving the ITMs by.
   • Looking at POX/POY, we can calibrate these into meters/count.
   • Both POX and POY were whitened.
   • POX whitening gain = +30dB, POY whitening gain = +18dB.
   • ITMX and ITMY were driven at 311.1Hz, with amplitude = 2counts.
   • Download 60 secs of data, demodulate at the drive frequency to find the peak height, and use the known ITM actuator gains to calibrate POX and POY.
   • POX: 7.34e-13 m / count (approx. 5 times less than the number in the Foton filter bank in the C1:CAL-CINV model).
   • POY: 1.325e-13 m / count
   • We did not optimize the demod phases for POX/POY tonight. 

Once these calibrations were updated, we decided to control the arms with ALS, and look at the POX spectrum. Y-arm ALS wasn't so stellar tonight, especially at low frequencies. I can see the GTRY spot moving on the CCD monitor, so something is wonky. To be investigated. But the X arm ALS noise looked pretty good.

Seems like updating the calibration did the job; see the attached comparison plot.

I was having a chat with EricQ about this today, just noting some points from our discussion down here so that I remember to look into this tomorrow.

• I believe that currently, the channels C1:ALS-BEATX_FINE_PHASE_OUT_HZ_DQ and the Y arm analog read out the frequency of the green beat, in Hz.
• In the comparison I plotted, I WRONGLY divided the spectrum of the IR beat by 2, instead of multiplying in by 2, which is what should actually be done for an apples-to-apples comparison.
• The deeper question is, what should this channel actually readout?
• Looking at my codes from past arm scans etc, I see that I am dividing the downloaded data by 2 in order to convert the X-axis of these scans to "IR Hz". But this should really be all we care about.
• So I think I will have to re-do the cts-to-Hz calibration in the ALS models. It should be possible to do ~10FSR scans with the IR beat, and then we can use the sideband resonances (presumably the sideband frequencies are known with better precision than the arm length, and hence the FSR) to calibrate the phase tracker.
• I don't think this changes the fact that the Fiber ALS situation has been improved - but I will have to repeat the measurement to be sure. The improvement may not be as stellar as I tried to sell in my previous elog .

  ---

  Other thoughts: 

• Can we make use of the Jetstor raid array for some kind of consolidated 40m CDS backup system? Once we've gotten everything of interest out of it...

Last night, while we were working on the ALS, I noticed the GTRY spot moving around (in PITCH) on the CCD monitor in the control room at ~1-2Hz. The operating condition was that the arm was locked to the IR, and the PSL green shutter was closed, so that only the arm transmissions were visible on the CCD screens. There was no such noticable movement of the GTRX spot. When looking at the out-of-loop ALS nosie in this configuration (but now with the PSL green shutter open of course), the Y arm ALS noise at low frequencies was much worse than the X arm.

Today, I looked into this a little more. I first checked that the Y-endtable enclosure was closed off as usual (as I had done some tweaking to the green input pointing some days ago). There are various green ghost beams on the Y-endtable. When time permits, we should make an effort to cleanly dump these. But the enclosure was closed as usual.

Then I looked at the in-loop Oplev error signal spectra for the ITMY and ETMY Oplev loops. There was high coherence between ETMYP Oplev error signal and GTRY. So I took a loop transfer function measurement - the upper UGF was around 3.5Hz. I increased the loop gain such that the upper UGF was around 4.5Hz, with phase margin ~30degrees. Doing so visibly reduced the angular movement of the GTRY spot on the CCD. Attachment #1 shows the Oplev loop TF after the gain increase, while Attachment #2 compares the GTRX and GTRY spectra (DC value is approximately the same for both, around 0.4). GTRY still seems a bit noisier at low frequencies, but the out-of-loop ALS noise for the Y arm now lines up much more closely with its reference trace from a known good time. 

MC autolocker and FSS loops were stuck because c1psl was unresponsive. I rebooted it and did a burtrestore to enable PSL locking. Then the IMC locked fine.

c1susaux and c1iscaux were also unresponsive so I keyed those crates as well, after taking the usual steps to avoid ITMX getting stuck - but it still got stuck when the Sat. Box. connectors were reconnected after the reboot, so I had to shake it loose with bias slider jiggling. This is annoying and also not very robust. I am afraid we are going to knock the ITMX magnets off at some point. Is this problem indicative of the fact that the ITMX magnets were somehow glued on in a skewed way? Or can we make the situation better by just tweaking the OSEM-holding fixtures on the cage?

In any case, I've started listing stuff down here for things we may want to do when we vent next.

A couple of minutes ago, Larry W swapped the fibers to our 40m Edgeswitch (BROCADE FWS 648G) to a faster connection. This is the switch to which our gateway machine, NODUS, is connected. The actual swap itself happened at the core router in Bridge, and took only a few seconds. After the switch, I double checked that I was able to ssh into nodus from my laptop, and Larry informed me that everything is working as expected on his end.

Larry also tells us that the other edgeswitch at the 40m (Foundry Networks), to which most of our GC network machines are connected, is a 100MBPS switch, and so we should re-route the connections from this switch to the BROCADE switch at our convenience to take advantage of the faster connection.

Summary:

Today I tried debugging the mysterious increase in REFL55 signal levels in the DRMI configuration. I focused on the demod board, because last week, I had tried routing these signals through different channels on the whitening board, and saw the same effect. 

Based on my tests, everything on the Demod board seems to work as expected. I need to think more about what else could be happening here - specifically do a more direct test on the whitening board.

Details:

• The demod board is a modified D990511 (marked up schematic + high-res photo to follow).
• Initially, I tried probing the LO signal levels at various points with the board in the eurocrate itself, with the help of an extender card.
• But this wasn't very convenient, so I pulled the board out to the office area for more testing.
• The 55MHz LO signal going into the board is ~0dBm (measured with Agilent network analyzer)
• I used the active probe to check the LO levels at various points along the signal chain, which mostly consists of attenuators, ERA-5SM amplifiers, and some splitters/phase rotators.
• Everything seemed consistent with the expected levels based on "typical" numbers for gains and insertion losses cited in the datasheets for these devices.
• I couldn't directly measure the level at the LO input to the mixer, but measuring the input to the ERA-5SM immediately before the mixer, barring problems with this amplifier, the LO input of the mixer is being driven at >17dBm which is what it wants.
• Next, I decided to check the gain, gain imbalance and orthogonality of the demodulation.
• For this purpose, I restored the board to the Eurocrate, reconnected the LO input to the board, and used a second Marconi at a slightly offset frequency to drive the PD input at ~0dBm.
• Attachment #1 - The measured outputs look pretty balanced and orthogonal. The gain is consistent with an earlier measurement I made some months ago, when things were "normal". More bullets added after Rana's questions:
  • 300 MHz bandwidth oscilloscope used to acquire the data
  • I and Q outputs were from the daughter board
  • Data was acquired via ethernet data download utility
  • 20 MHz low-pass filter turned on on the Oscilloscope while downloading the data

All connections have been restored untill further debugging later in the evening.

[rana,gautam]

We did an ingenious checkup of the whitening board tonight.

• The board is D990694
• We made use of a tip-tilt DAC channel for this test (specifically TT1 UL, which is channel 1 on the AI board). We disconnected the cable going from the AI board to the TT coil driver board.
  • as opposed to using a function generator to drive the whitening filter, this approach allows us to not have to worry the changing offsets as we switch the whitening gain.
  • By using the CDS system to generate the signal and also demodulate it, we also don't have to worry about the drive and demod frequencies falling out of sync with each other.
• The test was done by injecting a low frequency (75.13 Hz, amplitude=0.1) excitation to this DAC channel, and using the LSC sensing matrix infrastructure to demodulate REFL55 I and Q at this frequency. Demod phases in these servos were adjusted such that the Q phase demodulated signal was minimized.
• An excitation was injected using awggui into TT1 UL exc channel.
• We then stepped the whitening gains for REFL55_I and REFL55_Q in 3dB steps, waiting 5 seconds for each step. Syntax is z step -s 5 C1:LSC-REFL55_I_WhiteGain +1.0,15 C1:LSC-REFL55_Q_WhiteGain +1.0,15
• Attachment #1 suggests that the whitening filter board is working as expected (each step is indeed 3dB and all steps are equal to the eye).
• Data + script used to generate this plot is in Attachment #2.

I've restored all connections at that we messed with at the LSC rack to their original positions.

The TT alignment seems to be drifting around more than usual after we disconnected one of the channels - when I came in today afternoon, the spot on the AS camera had drifted by ~1 spot diameter so I had to manually re-align TT1. 

After our Demod/Whitening electronics investigations suggested nothing obviously wrong, I decided to give DRMI locking another go tonight.

Surprisingly, there was no evidence of REFL55 behaving weirdly tonight, and I was able to easily lock the DRMI on 1f error signals using the recipe I've been using in the last few months.

Not sure what to make of all this .

I got in a ~15 minute lock, but I wasn't prepared to do any sort of characterization/ sensing / attempt to turn on coil-dewhitening, and I'm too tired to try again tonight. I was however able to whiten the error signals, as I have been able to do in the past. There is a ~45Hz bump in MICH that I haven't seen in the past.

I'll try and do some characterization tomorrow eve, but it's encouraging to at least get back to the pre-FB-failure state of locking.

Current status:

• There is a single Acromag ADC unit installed in 1X4
• It is presently hooked up to the PSL NPRO diagnostic connector channels
• I had (re)-started the acquisiton of these channels on August 16 - but for reasons unknown, the tmux session that was supposed to be running the EPICS server on megatron seems to have died on August 22 (judging by the trend plot of these channels, see Attachment #1)
• I had not set up an upstart job that restarts the server automatically in such an event. I manually restarted it for now, following the same procedure as linked in my previous elog.
• While I was at it, I also took the opportunity to edit the Acromag channel names to something more appropriate - all channels previously prefixed with C1:ACRO- have now been prefixed with C1:PSL-

Plan of action:

1. Hardware - we have, in the lab, in addition to the installed ADC unit
   • 3x 8 channel differential input ADC units
   • 2x 8 channel differential output DAC units
   • 1x 16 channel BIO unit
   • 2U chassis + connectors + breakout boards + other misc hardware that I think Johannes and Lydia procured with the original plan to replace the EX slow controls.
   • Some relevant elogs: Panel designs, breakout design, sketch for proposed layout, preliminary channel list.
     So on the hardware side, it would seem that we have everything we need to go ahead with replacing the EX slow controls with an Acromag system, although Johannes probably knows more about our state of readiness from a hardware PoV.
2. Software
   • We probably want to get a dedicated machine that will handle the EPICS channel serving for the Acromag system
   • Have to figure out the networking arrangement for such a machine
   • Have to figure out how to set up the EPICS server protocol in such a way that if it drops for whatever reason, it is automatically restarted

There was a pretty large glitch in MC1 about an hour ago. The misalignment was so large that the autolocker wasn't able to lock the IMC. I manually re-aligned MC1 using the bias sliders, and now IMC locks fine. Attached is a 90 second plot of 2K data from the OSEMs showing the glitch. Judging from the wall StripTool, the IMC was well behaved for ~4 hours before this glitch - there is no evidence of any sort of misalignment building up, judging from the WFS control signals.

I re-enabled the MC SUS damping and IMC locking for some IFO work just now.

Thanks to Jonathan Hanks, it appears we can now access test-points again using dataviewer.

I haven't done an exhaustive check just yet, but I have loaded a few testpoints in dataviewer, and ran a script that use testpoint channels (specifically the ALS phase tracker UGF setting script), all seems good.

So if I remember correctly, the major CDS fix now required is to solve the model unloading issue.

Thanks to Jamie/Jonathan Hanks/KT for getting us back to this point! Here are the details:

After reading logs and code, it was a simple daqdrc config change.

The daqdrc should read something like this:

...
set master_config=".../master";
configure channels begin end;
tpconfig ".../testpoint.par";
...


What had happened was tpconfig was put before the configure channels
begin end.  So when daqd_rcv went to configure its test points it did
not have the channel list configured and could not match test points to
the right model & machine.  Dave and I suspect that this is so that it
can do an request directly to the correct front end instead of a general
broadcast to all awgtpman instances.

Simply reordering the config fixes it.

I tested by opening a test point in dataviewer and verifiying that
testpoints had opened/closed by using diag -l.  Xmgr/grace didn't seem
to be able to keep up with the test point data over a remote connection.

You can find this in the logs by looking for entries like the following
while the daqd is starting up.  When we looked we saw that there was an
entry for every model.

Unable to find GDS node 35 system c1daf in INI fiels

Summary:

I did some work today to see if I could use the IR beat for ALS control. Initial tests were encouraging.

I will now embark on the noise budgeting.

Details:

• For this test, I used the X arm
• I hooked up the X-arm + PSL IR beat to the X-arm DFD channel, and used the Y-arm DFD channels to simultaneously monitor the X-arm green beat.
• I then transitioned to ALS control and used POX as an out-of-loop sensor for the ALS noise.
• Attachment #1 shows a comparison of the measurements. In red is the IR beat, while the green traces are from the test EricQ and I did a couple of nights ago using the green beat.
• I also wanted to do some arm cavity scans with the arm under ALS control with the IR beat - but was unsucessful. The motivation was to fix the ALS model counts->Hz calibration factors.
• I did however manage to do a 10 FSR scan using the green beatnote - however, towards the end of this scan, the green beat frequency (read off the control room analyzer) was ~140MHz, which I believe is outside (or at least on the edge) of the bandwidth of the Green BBPDs. The fiber coupled IR beat photodiodes have a much larger (1GHz) spec'd bandwidth.

I am leaving the green beat electronics on the PSL table in the switched state for further testing...

Now that the DRMI locking seems to be repeatable again, I want to see if I can improve the measured MICH noise. Recall that the two dominant sources of noise were

1. BS Oplev loop A2L - this was the main noise between 30-60Hz.
2. DAC noise - this dominated between ~60-300Hz, since we were operating with the de-whitening filters off.

In preparation for some locking attempts today evening, I did the following:

1. Added steeper elliptic roll-off filters for the ITMX and ITMY Oplevs. This is necessary to allow the de-whitening filters to be turned on without railing the DAC.
2. Modified the BS Oplev loop to also have steeper high-frequency (>30Hz) roll off. The roll-off between 15-30Hz is slightly less steep as a result of this change.
3. Measured all Oplev loop TFs - UGFs are between 4 Hz and 5 Hz, phase margin is ~30degrees. I did not do any systematic optimization of this for today.
4. Went into the Foton filter banks for all the coil output filters, and modified the "Output" settings to be on "Input crossing", with a "Tolerance" of 10 and a "Timeout" of 3 seconds. These settings are to facilitate smooth transition between the two signal paths (without and with coil-dewhitening). The parameters chosen were arbitrary and not optimized in any systematic manner.
5. After making the above changes, I tried engaging the de-whitening filters on ITMX, ITMY and BS with the arms locked. In the past, I was unable to do this because of a number of issues - Oplev loop shapes and Foton settings among them. But today, the switching was smooth, the single arm locks weren't disturbed when I engaged the coil de-whitening.

Hopefully, I can successfully engage a similar transition tonight with the DRMI locked. The main difference compared to this daytime test is going to be that the MICH control signal is also going to be routed to the BS.

Tasks for tonight, if all goes well:

1. Lock DRMI.
2. Use UGF servos to set the overall loop gains for DRMI DoFs.
3. Reduce PRCL->MICH and SRCL->MICH coupling.
4. Measure loop shapes of all DRMI DoFs.
5. Make sensing matrix measurement.
6. Engage coil-dewhitening, download data, make NB.

Unrelated to this work: the PMC was locked near the upper rail of the PZT, so I re-locked it closer to the middle of the range.

Summary:

Tonight, I was able to lock the DRMI, turn on the whitening filters for the sensing PDs, and also turn on the coil de-whitening filters for ITMX, ITMY and BS. However, I didn't see the expected improvement in the MICH spectrum between ~50-300 Hz . Sad.

Details:

I basically went through the list of tasks I made in the previous elog. Some notes:

• The UGF servos suggested that I had to lower the SRCL gain. I lowered it from -0.055 to -0.025. OLTF measurement using In1/In2 method suggested UGF ~120Hz. I don't know why this should be. Plot to be uploaded later.
• Since we aren't actuating on the ITMs, I was able to leave their coils de-whitened all the time.
• For the BS, it was trickier - I had to play around a little with the "Tolerance" setting in Foton while looking at transients (using DTT, not a scope for now) while switching the filters.
• This transition isn't so robust yet - but eventually I found a setting that worked, and I was able to successfully turn on the de-whitening thrice tonight (but also failed about the same number of times). [GV Oct 6 2017: Remember that the PD whitening has to be turned on for this transition to be successful - otherwise the RMS from the high frequencies saturate the DAC.]
• The locks were pretty stable. One was ~10mins, one was ~15mins, and I broke both deliberately because I was out of ideas as to why the part of the MICH error signal spectrum that I thought was due to DAC noise didn't improve.
• I've made a bunch of shell scripts to help with the various switchings - but now that I think of it, I should make these python scripts.

Attachment #1: Comparison of MICH_ERR with and without the BS de-whitening. Note that the two ITMs have their coils de-whitened in both sets of traces.

Attachment #2: Spectra of MICH output and one of the BS coil outputs in both states. The DAC RMS increases by ~30x when the de-whitening is engaged, but is still well within limits.

So it looks like the switching of paths is happening correctly. The "CDS BIO STATUS" MEDM screen also shows the appropriate bits toggling when I turn the de-whitening on/off. There is no broadband coherence with MCF between 50-300 Hz so it seems unlikely that this could be frequency noise.

Clearly I am missing something. But anyways I have a good amount of data, may be useful to put together the post CDS/electronics modification DRMI noise budget. More analysis to follow.

I was unable to download data using nds2. Gabriele had reported similar problems a week ago but I hadn't followed up on this.

I repeated steps 5-7 from elog 13161, and now it seems that I can get data from the nds2 servers again. Unclear why the nds2 server had to be restarted. I wonder if this is somehow related to the mysterious acromag EPICS server tmux session dropout.

MC autolocker was not working - PCdrive was railed at its upper rail for ~2 hours judging by the wall StripTool trace. I tried restarting the init processes on megatron, but that didn't fix the problem. The reason seems to have been related to c1iool0 failing - after keying the crate, autolocker came back fine and MC caught lock almost immediately.

Additionally, c1susaux, c1auxex,c1auxey and c1iscaux are also down. I'm not planning on using the IFO tonight so I am not going to reboot these now.