[Gautam, Johannes]

While checking how smooth the transition is we still noticed significant motion of ETMX by looking at the locked green laser and OpLevs. We found that this motion was not caused by interruption of the slow offset adjust, but rather the Watchdog being re-initialized to its OFF state, which cuts the fast channels OFF. On other optics this is observed too, but not as severe. The cause is a rather large offset on the LR coil coming from the fast DAQ, which was reported as 50mV by the slow readback channel (while other readback values are <10mV). It is present even when turning the output of the CDS model OFF, but vanishes when the watchdog is triggered. This helped us trace it to an offset of the DAC output itself: it is present at the output of the AI board but vanishes when the DAC is disconnected. The actual offset is ~40mV, as opposed to other channels on the same board, which ahve offsets in the range 3-7mV.

While we can compensate for this offset in software - it made us  wonder if the DAC channel is somehow busted and if that's what causing the 'wandering' of ETMX that we have been observing recently. There are two free DAC channels on the AI chassis that has the side coil and the green temperature control signals. We could re-route the LR signal through a different DAC channel to fix this.

gautam: 40mV offset at the AI board output gets multiplied by 3 in the dewhitening board, so there is a 120mV DC offset going to the coil (measured at dewhite board output with DMM). The offset itself isn't hurting us, but the fact that it is several times larger than other channels led us to wonder if it could be drifting around as well. From my SOS pitch balancing forays, in my head I have the number 30mrad as being the full range of the OSEM actuation - so if the offset swings by 120mV, that's ~150urad of motion, which is quite large, and is of the order of magnitude I'm used to seeing ETMX move around by.