ELOG 40m

GC750 setup, 1X4 Hub connected, ETMX images

The GC750 camera has been setup to look at ETMX. In addition, the new 1X4 rack mounted switch (131.215.113.200) has been connected via new cat6 cable to the control room hub (131.215.113.1?), thanks to Eric. The camera is now plugged into 1X4 rack switch and now has a gigabit connection to the control room computers as well as Mafalda (131.215.113.23).

By using ssh -X mafalda or ssh -X 131.215.113.23, then typing:

target
cd Prosilica/bin-pc/x86/
./Sampleviewer

A viewer will be brought up. By clicking on the 3rd icon from the left (looks like an eye) will bring up a live view.

Closing the view, and then cd ../../40mCode, and then running ./Snap --help will tell you how to use a simple code for taking .tiff images as well as setting things such as exposure length and size of image (in pixels) to send.

When the interferometer was set to an X-arm only configuration, we took two series of 200 images each, with two different exposure lengths.

Attached are three pdf images. The first is just a black and white single image, the second is an average of 100 images, and the third is the standard deviation of the 100 images.

569

Wed Jun 25 18:03:21 2008

FSS Input Offset slider problem

While working on the PMC scanning, I noticed that the FSS input offset slider is doing nothing.
I traced the signal flow and checked the cables/boards.
The slider changes the output voltage from a VMIVME4116 DAC in the PSL rack. This output voltage is confirmed to be correct at the FLKM64 connector. The signal is connected to the FSS servo interface box (D040423) trough a ribbon cable. However, the output from the interface box is always -27V regardless of the slider position.
Therefore, either the interface box (D040423) or the ribbon cable has a problem.
I will debug the interface box using an extension card when no one is working on the interferometer.

570

Thu Jun 26 01:08:22 2008

Alarm Handler Revived

I have revived the Alarm Handler by turning it on on op540m and adjusting the levels of
several of the alarming channels to not alarm (like laser power). The alarm levels are now
set to something reasonable and people should start actually paying attention to them.

I also removed the EO Shutter and Stacis alarm stuff since we don't use them.

To really get in and edit it, you have to close the Alarm Handler and edit the file
in /cvs/cds/caltech/alh/. It allows you to add/subtract useful channels and put in
guidance information.

If the alarm handler beeps about something, don't just close it or silence it, Steve. Just
fix it somehow (either set the threshold better or find the real cause).

579

Thu Jun 26 21:07:11 2008

I realized today, that yesterday while we were trying to debug the adaptive noise canceler, I turned
off the analog dewhitening on MC1. I did this by changing settings on the Xycom screen but I
forgot to elog this -- this may have caused problems with locking via increased frequency noise.
I have now returned it to its nominal, dewhitening on, configuration.

I also used mDV to look at the last year of dust trend. I have plotted here the cumulative
histogram in percentile units of the 0.5 micron dust level. The x-axis is in units of particles per cu. ft.
and the y-axis is percentage. For example, the plot tells us that over the last year, the counts were
below 6000, 90% of the time. I have set the yellow and red alarm levels to alarm at the 95-th and 99-th
percentile levels, respectively.

602

Mon Jun 30 13:48:47 2008

John, Rob

Don't put the bin in front of the air conditioning unit

We spotted that the laser power was dropping.

The air conditioning unit was blocked by the blue bin/trash can/cestino causing the laser head temp to increase by 2 degrees.

Let's be careful about this in the future.

603

Mon Jun 30 14:07:26 2008

Rob

Don't put the bin in front of the air conditioning unit

Quote:

We spotted that the laser power was dropping.

the offending configuration:

606

Mon Jun 30 16:00:02 2008

josephb, sam

Sam and I setup Cat6 cable from Megatron to the 1Y6 Switch (131.215.113.252) and also connected the 1Y6 Hub to the control room switch.

While I was at it, I checked the configurations of the two switchs now connected (one in 1X4 and one in 1Y6) to the martian network. For some reason, the 1X4 had switched to DHCP enabled and was using 131.215.113.105 as an IP address. I had thought I had setup it correctly initially, so am not sure what caused the change.

The easiest way I know of to check the setup is use smartwizard discovery program from the Netgear install CD (in the equipment manual file cabinet of the control room) on a windows machine. The passwords have been set to the controls password.

Megatron should now see and be accessible through the martian network.

611

Tue Jul 1 11:57:24 2008

MZ servo switch problem again

C1:PSL-MZ_BLANK switch (to turn on/off the servo) is not working again. The switch is always off regardless of the epics state.
I pushed the cables into the xycom card, but it did not fix the problem.

612

Tue Jul 1 12:08:38 2008

Joe and I switched cables so that the PMCR screen actually shows reflection not transmission.

The trans camera had a BNC connected to "video out" labelled PMC input PD. The video signal
going to the monitors does not come from "video out", it comes out the "DC in/sync" cable.
As far as we can see this diode doesn't exist. Where should the PMC input PD BNC cable be
connected?

616

Tue Jul 1 16:48:42 2008

rob, john

MZ servo switch problem resolved forever

Quote:

We have fixed this problem forever, by totally disabling this switch. Looking at the schematic for the MZ servo and the datasheet of the AD602, we found that a HI TTL on pin 4 disables the output of the AD602. Since the MZ servo was stuck in the off position, this seemed to indicate that it may be the XYCOM220 itself which is broken, constantly putting out a +5V signal regardless of the EPICS controls. We thought we might be able to get around this by disconnecting this signal at the cross-connect, but ultimately we couldn't find it because there is no wiring diagram for the Mach-Zehnder (!). So, we pulled the board and wired pin 9A of P1 to ground, permanently NORMALizing the MZ_BLANK switch. John has marked up the schematic, and someone should modify the MEDM screen and check the new screen into svn.

We can still the turn the MZ servo on and off by using the test input 1 switch.

Someone also will need to modify the MZ autolocker to use the test input 1 (MZ_SW1) instead of the old MZ_BLANK.

621

Wed Jul 2 06:46:05 2008

This morning I turned on the NPRO on the AP table so that it can warm up for a few hours before I start using it today.
The flipping mirror is down so no beam is injected in to the IFO.

Alberto

631

Thu Jul 3 13:54:26 2008

Does mDV work on rosalba? It can't find NDS_GetChannels. Looking on mafalda, I see that NDS_GetChannels is a mexglx. I think this means someone may need to compile it for 64-bit matlab before we can have mDV on rosalba. When that's done, we should get mDV running on megatron.

649

Tue Jul 8 21:46:38 2008

GC650M moved to the PMC transmission

I moved a GC650M, which was monitoring the light coming out of the PSL, to the transmission port of the PMC to see the transmitted mode shape.
It will stay there unless someone find other use of it.

Just FYI, you can see the picture from the control computers by the following procedure:

ssh -X mafalda
cd /cvs/cds/caltech/target/Prosilica/40mCode
./SampleViewer

Chose 02-2210A-06223 and click on the Live View icon.

681

Wed Jul 16 15:59:04 2008

josephb, Eric

PMC trans camera path

In order to reduce saturation, we placed a Y1 plate (spare from the SP table) in transmission just before the GC650 camera looking at the PMC transmision. The reflection (most of the light) was dumped to a convient razor blade dump. We also removed the 0.3 and 0.5 ND filters and placed them in the 24 hour loan ND filter box.

Good exposure values to view are now around 3000 for that camera.

682

Wed Jul 16 16:28:14 2008

Fixed IP address on Switch

Realized today that the change I made back on June 30th to the switch was to the wrong switch. I had disabled the DHCP setting and mislabeled the switch in the control room (which seems to not have affected anything).

I've turned DHCP back on and labeled it correctly using the Netgear "Smartwizard discovery" program.

693

Fri Jul 18 12:24:15 2008

josephb, Eric

Changed Lenses on GC750 at ETMX

We removed the giant TV zoom lens and replaced it with a much smaller fixed zoom lens. Currently it views the entire optic. We have another (also small) zoom lens which focuses much better on the spot itself. With how far back the camera is currently placed, neither of these fixed zoom lenses can touch or hit the view port or the chamber while still attached to camera and mount, even using all of the mount's motion range. So this should be less of a safety issue.

Ideally, we'd like to get some images of the full optic (including osems and so forth) with the X-arm locked, and then use the higher zoom lens while still locked, to get images we can use to calibrate the x and y length scales.

710

Mon Jul 21 19:55:16 2008

Jenne put the MC board on extender today - its still that way but everything is probably connected (check AO).

We measured the TFs of the DAQ section for MC_F because of how everything looked wrong in the plots Jenne
put in the log earlier. Everything we measured today seemed to jive with the schematic. We also looked up
the original traveler for this board which Betsy filled in years ago: it also is in spec for the DAQ filtering.

So then I looked at the power spectrum of the output signal to the VCO. It had lots of HFC (high frequency crap).
I adjusted the parameters of the FSS (common gain, fast gain, RF phase Astonished

) and lowered the MC common gain. This
produced a global minimum in that 4D parameter space.

I think that basically, the FSS gain is too low even with the common gain slider maxed. Having the fast gain up
at 19 dB like I had left it was bad - even though it minimizes the PC control signal, it produces a lot of HFC
up around 100 kHz in MC_F. After John (finally) gets around to measuring the FSS loop we can figure out how to
better tune this. The MC gain then has to be tuned so as to best minimize the HFC given the new FSS gain; there's
basically no coupling from the MC gain to the FSS loop shape so its always best to tune the FSS first. Pleased

The RF phase of the FSS was a mystery - I have no idea why it should do anything and I have never heard of this
and I don't know why I tried it today. But...changing it by ~0.6-0.7 slider units reduced the HFC by another factor
of ~3. Somebody should put this slider into units of degrees.8-)

Here's a table of the changes. Please make these the new nominals:

you asked for:   diff 2008/07/21,13:00 2008/07/22,2:44:16 utc '.*FSS.*|.*MC.*'
LIGO controls: differences, 2008 07/21 13:00:00 utc vs. 2008 07/22 02:44:16 utc
__Epics_Channel_Name______   __Description__________   __value1____     __value2____
C1:IOO-MC_REFL_GAIN                                    22.000000        19.000000
C1:IOO-MC_REFL_OFFSET                                  0.818380         0.818100
C1:PSL-FSS_MGAIN                                       10.000000        30.000000
C1:PSL-FSS_PHCON                                       2.073170         1.413170

The attached plot shows the "SERVO" TNC output of the board; this is supposed to be the same as the voltage going to the
VCO box. So its V/Hz transfer function is flat above 40 Hz. Tomorrow Jenne will post more data and remove the extender
board.

Since I only used an SR785, I only saw noise up to 100 kHz. Its key to use an RF spectrum analyzer when checking out
the FSS and the MC systems.

719

Wed Jul 23 01:42:26 2008

FSS RFPD: Examined, "repaired", and re-installed

Rob said that there might be something wrong with the FSS RFPD since the loop gain is so low.
Next time we should just use the Jenne laser on it in-situ and compare with our reference.

We had a 24.5 MHz LSC PD which Rob got from Sam. Sam got it from Rai. I gave it to Rai in Livingston
because it seemed suspicious. Seems fine now. This black box PD had a lower overall response than
the goldbox one we already had. The 2001-2005 era diodes which we got from the Canadian Perkin-Elmer
all had high capacitance and so that's not a surprise.

So the goldbox one was not broken totally.

I found that the offset came from a cracked capacitor. C25 was a yellow thru-hole ceramic 0.1 uF.
Its a surface mount board...don't know why this was like this but there's also no reason it should
have cracked unless it was soldered on with too much heat. I replaced it with a 0.47 uF ceramic
surface mount. Also R24 was a 20 Ohm resistor and L3 was not stuffed?? Removed R24 and put a 1 uH
inductor into L3. This is there so that the input to the MAX4107 is AC coupled.

However, the DC signal that Rob saw was actually because of the cracked C25. It had shorted and was
making a 25 mV signal at the input to the MAX4107 which has a gain of 10. This was producing ~165 mVdc
into a 50 Ohm load and so it could have saturated most mixers. The FSS board, however, has an overly
monstrous level 21 (I think) mixer and so this should not have been an issue. Maybe.

I was able to lock with the 24.5 MHz black box PD but it was not too hard to repair the gold box one
so I did. I tuned it so that the notch is truly at 43 MHz (2x the FSS 21.5 MHz modulation) but because
someone has done this using a hacky cap in parallel with the main PD, I am unable to get the resonant
peak to line up at 21.5 MHz. Its at 23 MHz instead. This loses us ~2 dB in signal. Since the frequency
is so low, we can increase the gain in the MAX4107 by another factor of 3 or so in the future.

So the PD is not our problem. Still worth verifying that the cable is good -- its around 10 miles long!!
And loops around in there with a bunch of other cables. We have an electronic phase shifter so this seems
totally misguided.

The other bad problem is that the mode matching is pretty horrible. Something like 1/3 of the carrier
power doesn't go into the cavity.

FSS TODO:
1) Check cable between RFPD and FSS box for quality. Replace with a good short cable.

2) Using a directional coupler, look at the RFPD output in lock on a scope with 50 Ohm term.
   I suspect its a lot of harmonics because we're overmodulating to compensate for the bad
   mode matching.

3) Purchase translation stages for the FSS mode matching lenses. Same model as the PMC lenses.
   Fix the mode matching.

4) Get the shop to build us up some more bases for the RFPDs on the PSL such as we have for the LSC.
   Right now they're on some cheesy Delrin pedestals. Too soft...

5) Dump the beam reflected off the FSS RFPD with a little piece of black glass or a razor dump.
   Anodized aluminum is no good and wiggles too much.

The attached PDF shows photos of the old and new style PDs. One page 3 there's a wire that I soldered on
as a handle so that we can remove the RF can (occasionally people claim that soldering to the lid screws
up the magnetic shielding magic of the lid. use this as a litmus test of their electronics know-how; its
a tin can - not an orgone box). Pages 4 & 5 are the circuit before I soldered, page 6 the cap after I
tried to remove it, page 7 is the circuit after I put in the new cap, and page 8 is the schematic with
the mark up of the changes.

724

Wed Jul 23 16:31:02 2008

Joe, Rana, Alberto,

we found out the password for Megatron so we could log in and set a new one so that now it's the same as that for controls.
The IP address is 131.215.113.59.

We had to switch to another LAN ports to actually connect it.

725

Wed Jul 23 17:19:48 2008

We changed the IP address. Ther new one is 131.215.113.95.

Joe, Alberto

Quote:

727

Wed Jul 23 21:48:30 2008

restore IFO when you're done with it

when you are done with the IFO, please click "Restore last auto-alignment" on the yellow IFO portion of the C1IFO_CONFIGURE.adl screen. Failure to comply will be interpreted as antagonism toward the lock acquisition effort and will be met with excoriation.

729

Thu Jul 24 01:04:01 2008

IFR2023A (aka MARCONI) settings

LSC

Quote:

P.S.: We made a test by changing the frequency of the local oscillator by a little bit and then coming back to the original value. We observed that the phase of the signal can change, so every time this frequency is moved the 3f demod phase need to be retuned.

We discovered this little tidbit in March, and remembered it tonight. Basically we found that whenever you change the frequency on one of these signal generators (and maybe any other setting as well), the phase of the signal can change (it's probably just the sign, but still...), meaning that you when you return settings to their intial value, not everything is exactly as it once was. For most applications, this doesn't matter. For us, where we use one Marconi to demodulate the product of two other Marconis, it means we can easily cause a great deal of grief for ourselves, as the demod phase for the double demod signals can appear to change.

Programmatically, what this means is that every time you touch a Marconi you must elog it. Especially if you change a setting and then put it back.

735

Thu Jul 24 19:29:26 2008

C1:PSL-STAT_FSS_NOM_C_GAIN is changed from 30 to -0.7

Koji, Yoichi

Since the light power going to the ref. cavity is now significantly increased (see Janne's elog later),

C1:PSL-STAT_FSS_NOM_C_GAIN

is changed from 30 to -0.7.
Otherwise, the MC did not lock.

743

Sun Jul 27 20:25:49 2008

Office Temperature increased to 75 F

Environment

Since we have the chiller for the PSL chiller now, I've just increased the office area
temperature set point by 2 F to 75 F to see if the laser will still behave.

744

Sun Jul 27 20:49:21 2008

After Aidan did whatever he did on op440m, I had to restart ntpd. I noticed it didn't actually do
anything so I restarted it by hand with the '-l' option to make a logfile. Essentially, the
problem is that NTPD is not allowed access to the outside world's NTP servers by our NAT router;
this should be fixed.

So for now I set all of the .conf files to point to rana and nodus' IP addresses. According to the
log files, that is successful. Rosalba and Mafalda, however, seem to have correct time but are
looking at rhel.ntp.pool.org and time.nist.gov, respectively. Maybe these have special rules?

For reference, the linux machines' conf files are /etc/ntp.conf
and the solaris machines' conf files are /etc/inet/ntp.conf

I also logged into dcuepics (aka scipe25) and did as instructed.

751

Mon Jul 28 23:41:07 2008

FSS/MC gains twiddled

I found the FSS and MC gain settings in a weird state. The FSS was showing excess PC drive and the MC wouldn't lock--even when it did, the boost stage would pull it off resonance. I adjusted the nominal FSS gains and edited the mcup and mcdown scripts. The FSS common gain goes to 30dB, Fast gain to 22dB, and MCL gain goes to 1 (which puts the crossover back around ~85 degrees where phase rises above 40 degrees).

752

Tue Jul 29 01:03:17 2008

IOO

MC length measurement

rob, yoichi

We measured the length of the mode cleaner tonight, using a variant of the Sigg-Frolov method. We used c1omc DAC outputs to inject a signal (at 2023Hz) into the AO path of the mode cleaner and another at DC into the EXT MOD input of the 166MHz IFR2023A. We then moved an offset slider to change the 166MHz modulation frequency until we could not see the 2023Hz excitation in a single-bounce REFL166. This technique could actually be taken a step further if we were really cool--we could actually demodulate the signal at 2023Hz and look for a zero crossing rather than just a powerspec minimum. In any case, we set the frequency on the Marconi by looking at the frequency counter when the Marconi setting+EXT MOD input were correct, then changed the Marconi frequency to be within a couple of Hz of that reading after removing the EXT MOD input. We then did some arithmetic to set the other Marconis.

The new f2 frequency is:


New              OLD
--------------------------
165983145        165977195

753

Tue Jul 29 09:12:43 2008

Koji

IOO

MC length measurement

I found that the prev modulation freq had been determined with a same kind of measurement by Osamu, which also looked accurate.
http://www.ldas-sw.ligo.caltech.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi?group=40m&task=view&date_to_view=09/12/2002&anchor_to_scroll_to=2002:09:12:17:10:30-ajw

(There is also a document by Dennis to note about this measurement
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/T/T020147-00.pdf )

So, it means that the round trip length of the MC shortened by 1mm in the 6 years.

New              OLD
--------------------------
27.0924          27.0934    [m]

Quote:

rob, yoichi

We measured the length of the mode cleaner tonight, using a variant of the Sigg-Frolov method.
....
The new f2 frequency is:

New              OLD
--------------------------
165983145        165977195

767

Wed Jul 30 13:09:40 2008

We turned the PSL power down by a factor of 4, blocked one half of the Mach Zehnder and scanned the PMC by applying a ramp signal to PMC PZT. Eric will adding plots later today of those results.

We returned the power to close to original level and removed the block on the Mach Zehnder, and then relocked the PMC.

773

Wed Jul 30 18:45:01 2008

SUS

New SUS Drift Technology

I updated the SUS DRIFT screen again, this time with a new feature.

I used Rolf's idea for the AdvLIGO status system and just made the nominals be an
unused sub-field (.SVAL) of the main INMON record. Then I wrote a .csh script to
use tdsavg to average the current INMON vals and insert that as the .SVAL. The next
script should read the .SVAL and set the HIHI and LOLO based on this.

Of course, the values I have just entered are no good because our suspensions are in
a bad state but we can run this script (SUS/setDriftNoms) next time things are good.

And...even better would be if someone were to do the same but used mDV to grab the
minute trend in the past good times instead of the tdsavg (which can't go in the past).

777

Thu Jul 31 16:11:22 2008

Matlab now works on megatron.

I did a few things:

1) Added to the PATH environment variable. Did this in .bash_profile in the /home/controls directory by adding the line

PATH=$PATH:/cvs/cds/caltech/apps/linux64/matlab/bin/
export PATH

This probably should be somewhere else up further up the line, but I was too lazy to figure it out.

2)Fixed a gateway mistake I had added earlier so the megatron could use the NAT router and see the outside world so yum worked.

3) Removed the i386 based libXp and openmotif packages.

4) Installed the x86_64 based libXp and openmotif packages.

Edit: Forgot that I also added the following line to the /etc/fstab file in order to mount the shared code. This was stolen directly from Rosalba's /etc/fstab file. This was so that it could see the matlab code.
linux1:/home/cds/ /cvs/cds nfs rw,bg,soft 0 0

778

Fri Aug 1 01:13:32 2008

PSL Quad change and new script

Koji and I changed a few optics so that now ~60% of the beam that went to the PSL POS QPD
now goes to the west side of the table for the aux. laser locking PLL. The beam is sort of
on the QPD again but needs a centering.

After this work I wrote a script SUS/freeswing-all.csh which puts a 30000 count offset into
the UL coil of each suspension and then disables it. This is just good enough to kick it up
so that the eigenfrequency can be measured. I ran it and it worked -- it finished running at

Fri Aug 1 00:44:30 PDT 2008

779

Fri Aug 1 10:45:46 2008

Megatron now running tcsh

At Rana's request, I've remotely switched Megatron over to using tcsh. I had to ssh -X in order ot use the "/sbin/system-config-users" program which is a graphical UI for modifying users. I had to go to preferences and uncheck hide system users, which then allowed me to see the controls user (at the bottom of the list), and edit it.

I also created a .tcshrc file in the /home/controls directory and copied the information from the .bashrc file, and also moved the matlab path definition into the PATH environment variable.

Does anyone know if sourcing /cvs/cds/caltech/cshrc.40m would be usable on a 64 bit machine, or does a new one need to be made for Megatron and/or Rosalba?

781

Fri Aug 1 16:33:52 2008

PSL Quad change and new script

Here's the sensor ringdown trend from the kick.

783

Sat Aug 2 13:07:23 2008

During the construction of the independent PLL I cleaned up some of the unused optics from the AP table. Essentially this should be harmless as they had already been isolated from any beam. They were related to Go's squeezing project and Osamu's MC Transmitted beam measurement.

Nevertherless, if you find any problem on the signals at the AP table (when the ifo returns), I am the person to be blamed.

I am going to update the table layout later next week.

784

Sat Aug 2 16:05:38 2008

Computer Scripts / Programs

mDV update

I did an svn update on our mDV directory. Justin has improved it so that the NDS client binaries
are included for solaris, mac, linux32, and linux64. Now you can just use this version without
having to worry about any path definitions.

786

Sun Aug 3 20:53:54 2008

We got our repaired Guralp back in the mail from England (s/n T4157). I plugged it in
to Ben's 3-Guralp breakout box (http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/D/D060506-00.pdf) and
verified that it is not oscillating (like it was before) and that it responds to us
jumping around.

The breakout box has way too much gain, however. The ADC wants +/-2 V and the box puts out
~5 Vpk in the night time.

Looking at the schematic, it has a DC gain of 200 and a double whitener (50,50:10,10) so that
there's a gain of 5000 from 50-2000 Hz. The Guralp has a transduction gain of 800 V/(m/s) and
so we can just calculate what the frequency dependent noise figure of the box has to be. I've
pulled it out, put it on the bench, and started reworking it. I am looking for a soldering/
testing volunteer.

The other kink in the problem is that since we want to use this for the adaptive noise cancellation,
we have to make the noise floor of the readout better than the ambient noise by the same factor
with which we want to cancel the noise.

790

Mon Aug 4 12:12:20 2008

The 40m vac envelope was vented this morning.
P1 is at 760 Torr

792

Mon Aug 4 16:20:20 2008

Dmass

ITMX magnet position relative to OSEMS

Photos

We have vented, and taken the following pics of the magnets to document their position before we ruin everything.

796

Tue Aug 5 02:39:55 2008

Koji

Abs. Len. Meas. ~ Optical Layout on the AP / PSL table 2008-Aug-05

Here are the PDF and the PNG of the AP and PSL table layouts.
After this photo, the squeezing setup at the AP table was removed.

798

Tue Aug 5 10:56:05 2008

Alberto

ITMX chamber opened and mirror released

D-Mass, Steve, Rana, Koji, Yoichi, Alberto,
We opened the ITMX chamber to check the optics after last week earthquake. In particular, from the spectra, ITMX seemed to be stuck and had to be released again. When we inspected the mirror, we found that it wasn�t necessary to touch it. It had become free again during the vent thanks to the change of conductivity in the air inside during the vent.
We checked the magnets and they seemed to be fine.
A couple of stop screws had lost the rubber on their tips, although we don�t know if that was due to the earthquake.
We also took advantage of the opening to center the LR and the left OSEMs in the mirror to their zero.
Inspecting the table we found a couple of things not totally clear on the configuration of the optics in the table. In particular we found a beam dump located too close to the ifo beam. Eventually we found out that the dump was meant to block a ghost beam coming from the ITM. A better location should probably be figured out for that. We also found that the POXM1 mirror designed to have the maximum reflectivity for the P polarization of the beam at 45 degrees is mounted so that the incident beam is at 22 degrees. This cause the beam to be 90% transmitted and only 10 percent reflected to POX. The transmitted beam appears at ther BSC chamber.

The ifo beam passes so close to the POXM1 mirror so that it can be clipped by its large metal frame ring. The beam at that point is about 6mm large and the ring is about 1cm thick so that we could gain some distance with a different mount.

800

Tue Aug 5 17:56:23 2008

Alberto

SRM and PRM inspection

Yoichi, Koji, Rana, Steve, Alberto

Today we opened the BSC to inspect the optics, and in particular the SRM and PRM.
We found that one of the side magnets of the SRM was broken and a piece of it fell and got stuck to the LR magnet.
We removed the LR OSEM and took off the broken part with tweezers. Since we couldn�t replace the magnet on the side,
we decided to just switch the OSEM to the other side were a second magnet was available. Then we centered the OSEMs.
Using the optical levers we aligned both the ITMX and the SRM so that now we have to center again the OSEMs on both.

The PRM was visibly tilted and it was out of the range of the OSEMs. To try to fix the tilt we lift it up a little
with the screws on the bottom and pushed it with the third screw on top. That had the effect of making the mirror
tilt to the opposite direction. We looked at the wires (see attached picture) and it seemed centered on the side
of the mirror.

Tomorrow we are going to reset the OSEMs on ITMX and SRM and then we�re going to try to fix the tilt on PRM.

809

Thu Aug 7 11:54:26 2008

New code + gstreamer allows for easy saving and compression of images

Modified the CamSnap code to output the image data stream to standard out. This can then be piped into a gstreamer plugin and then be used to save, encode, transmit, receive, slice, dice and or mangle video (or virtually any type of data stream).

The gstreamer webpage can be found at: http://www.gstreamer.net/

Under documentation you can find a list off all available plug-ins. Some good, some bad, some ugly.

Running the following command on Mafalda (via ssh -X mafalda) or Rosalba while in /cvs/cds/caltech/target/Prosilica/40mCode/SnapCode/

CamSnap -F 'Mono8' -c 44058 -E 15000 -X 0 -Y 0 -H 480 -W 752 -l 0 -m 1000 | gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 blocksize=360960 ! video/x-raw-gray, height=480, width=752, bpp=8,depth=8,framerate=1/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ximagesink

This command will create a window which displays what the camera with UID 44058 is looking at. It will display 1000 images, then quit. (You can switch the -m 100 to -i to just have it continue until the process is stopped).

You can also encode the data into compressed format and save it in a media file. The following command line will encode the images into an ogg media file (.ogm), which can be played with the totem viewer (available on Rosalba or almost any machine running Ubuntu or Centos) or any other viewer capable of handling ogm files. By switching the plugins you can generate other formats as well.

The compression is good, putting 300 images normally about 500K individually uncompressed to about 580K as a single file.

The following command line was used to generate the attached video file:

CamSnap -F 'Mono8' -c 44058 -E 5000 -X 0 -Y 0 -H 480 -W 752 -l 0 -m 300 | gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 blocksize=360960 ! video/x-raw-gray, height=480, width=752, bpp=8,depth=8,framerate=30/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! oggmux ! filesink location="./testVideo.ogm"

Currently looking into plugins which allow you to pull individual frames out of a video file and display or save them in a variety of formats. This would allow us to save long term images in compressed video format, and then pull out individual frames as needed.

Also need to look into how to "T" the streams, so one can be displaying while another encodes and saves.

813

Fri Aug 8 10:58:05 2008

Cameras and gstreamer

In regards to camera failure:
1) I forgot to reconnect that particular camera to the network (my fault) so thats why it was failing.

2) Even with the correct camera connected, I've realized at full frame rate, op440m is going to get a few frames and then fail, as I don't think it has a fast enough ethernet card. It will work on Rosalba, and will also work ssh-ing from Rosalba because it is using a new ethernet card. It also works on my laptop, which is where I originally tested the command. One way to get around this is to increase the time between pictures, by changing -l 0 to -l 1 (or higher), where the number after the "ell" is the number of seconds to wait between frame captures.

3) What I should do is figure out the UDP transmission plugins for gstreamers and compress first (using the theoraenc since it gets compression ratios of better than 100:1) and transmit that over the network.

I have since reconnected the camera, so it should work on Rosalba and any sufficiently well connected computer. For other machines like linux2 or op440, try the following line:

Running the following command on Mafalda (via ssh -X mafalda) or Rosalba while in /cvs/cds/caltech/target/Prosilica/40mCode/SnapCode/

CamSnap -F 'Mono8' -c 44058 -E 10000 -X 0 -Y 0 -H 480 -W 752 -l 1 -m 100 | gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 blocksize=360960 ! video/x-raw-gray, height=480, width=752, bpp=8,depth=8,framerate=1/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ximagesink

This will be at a much slower frame rate (1 per second) but should work on any of the machines. (Tested on linux2).

815

Fri Aug 8 12:21:57 2008

Switched X end ethernet connections over to new switch

In 1X4, I've switched the ethernet connections from c1iscex and c1auxex over to the new Prosafe 24 port switches. They also use the new cat6 cables, and are labeled.

At the moment, everything seems to be working as normally as it was before. In addition:

I can telnet into c1auxex (and can do the same to c1auxey which I didn't touch).
I can't telnet into c1iscex (but I couldn't do that before, nor can I telnet into c1iscey either, and I think these are computers which once running don't let you in).

822

Mon Aug 11 11:36:11 2008

josephb, Steve

c1susvme1 minor problems

Around 11 am c1susvme1 start having issues. Namely C1:SUS-PRM_FE_SYNC was railing at some large value like 16384 (2^14). I presume this means the computer was running catastophically late.

I turned off the BS and ITM watch dogs (the PRM was already off), tried hitting reset and sshing in, and running startup, but this didn't help. I then turned off the c1susvme2 associated watch dogs (MC1-3, SRM) and went out to do a hard reboot by switching the crate power off. c1susvme2 came back up fine, was restarted and associated watch dogs turned back on. However, c1susvme1 came back up without mounting /cvs/cds/.

As a test, I replaced the ethernet connection with a CAT6 cable to the Prosafe switch in 1Y6, and then ran reboot on c1susvme1. When it came back up, it had mounted properly, and I was able to run the ./startup.cmd file. At this point it seems to be happy. The new cable is in the trays coming in from the top of the 1Y4 and 1Y6 and approriately labeled.

Edit: Apparently ITMX and ITMY became excited after the reboot (perhaps I turned the watchdogs back on too early? Although that was after the DAQ light was listed as green for c1susvme). Steve noticed this when the alarms went off again (I had turned them off after the reboot seemed successful), and he damped them. Interestingly, the BS remained unexcited.

823

Mon Aug 11 12:42:04 2008

Continuing saga of c1susvme1

Coming back after lunch around 12:30pm, c1susvme1's status was again red. After switching off watchdogs, a reboot (ssh, su, reboot) and restarting startup.cmd, c1susvme1 is still reporting a max sync value (16384), occassionally dropping down to about 16377. The error light cycles between green and red as well.

At this point, I'm under the impression further reboots are not going to solve the problem.

Currently leaving the watchdogs associated with c1susvme1 off for the moment, at least until I get an idea of how to proceed.

824

Mon Aug 11 13:59:23 2008

While poking around the crate, I noticed an error light on one of the c1susvme2 related boards was lit, while the corresponding light on the c1susvme1 was not. This confuses me as the c1susvme1 is the one having problems.

As a quick sanity check, I unplugged the ethernet connection from the c1susvme1 labeled board, and confirmed I couldn't log into it, and then plugged it back in, restarted it, and re-ran the startup script. This time c1susvme1 seemed to come up fine. Re-enabling the watchdogs doesn't seem to kick anything, and in fact seems to be bringing everything into line properly.

Although the error light on the c1susvme2 clk drvr board is still on. So I'm not sure what thats trying to tell us. Open to suggestions.

825

Mon Aug 11 15:07:49 2008

Procyon aka fb40m switched to new switch

I've connected Procyon to the Prosafe 24 port switch with a new, labeled Cat6 cable. Quick tests with dataviewer shows that its working.

828

Tue Aug 12 12:21:13 2008