As suspected - the problem was with the TTs. I tested the TT signal chain by driving a low frequency sine wave using AWG and looking at the signal on an o'scope. But I saw nothing, neither at the AI board monitor point, nor at the actual coil driver mon point. I decided to look at the IOP testpoints for the DAC channels, to see if the signals were going through okay on the digital side. But the IOP channels were flatlined, as viewed on dataviewer (see Attachment #1). This despite the fact that the DAC output monitor screen in the model itself was showing some sensible numbers, again see Attachment #1.
Looking at the CDS overview screen, there were no red flags. But there was a red indicator sneakily hidden away in the IOP model's CDS status screen, the "DAC" field in the state word is red. As Attachment #2 shows, a change in the state word is correlated with the time ASDC went to 0.
Note that there are also no errors on the c1lsc frontend itself, judging by dmesg. I want to do a model restart, but (i) this will likely require reboots of all vertex FEs and (ii) I want to know if any CDS experts want to sniff for clues to what's going on before a model restart wipes out some secret logfiles. I'm a little confused that the rtcds isn't throwing up any errors and causing models to crash if the values are not being written to the registers of the DAC. It may also be that the DAC card itself is dead . To re-iterate, all the EPICS readbacks were suggesting that I am injecting a signal right up to the IOP.
Quoting from the runtime diagnostics note:
NOTE: As V2.7, if this error is detected, the IOP will output zero values to all DAC modules, as a protective measure. Only method to clear this is to restart the IOP and all applications on that computer
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