A readout system for microstrip silicon sensors has been developed as a result of a collaboration among the University of Liverpool, the CNM (Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica) of Barcelona and the IFIC (Instituto de Física Corpuscular) of Valencia. The name of this collaboration is ALIBAVA and it is integrated in the RD50 Collaboration. This system is able to measure the collected charge in one or two microstrip silicon sensors by reading out all the channels of the sensor(s), up to 256, as an analogue measurement. The system uses two Beetle chips to read out the detector(s). The Beetle chip is an analogue pipelined readout chip used in the LHCb experiment. The system can operate either with non-irradiated and irradiated sensors as well as with n-type and p-type microstrip silicon sensors. Heavily irradiated sensors will be used at the SLHC, so this system can be used to research the performance of microstrip silicon sensors in conditions as similar as possible to the SLHC operating conditions. The system has two main parts: a hardware part and a software part. Hardware part has a dual board based system part connected by flat cable. Mother board intended:

...and the daughter board:

This acquired data is sent by USB to be stored in a PC for a further processing. The software controls the system and processes the data acquired from the sensors in order to store it in an adequate format file. Alibava has two software levels, low level:

...and high level:

• GUI: control of the system and data monitoring;
• Output file generation for further processing and analysis.

There are also macros for ROOT in order to process the data acquired with the software; data acquired with the system can be easily processed using ROOT framework. Operating system compatibility is only GNU/Linux with a version fully operational! For more information, project detail and discuss click here.

           

The Comedi project develops open-source drivers, tools, and libraries for data acquisition. Requires a Linux 2.6 kernel. Comedi works with standard Linux kernels, but also with its real-time extensions RTAI and RTLinux/GPL.The project's source code is distributed in two packages, comedi and comedilib, and provides several Linux kernel modules and a user space library:

• Comedi is a collection of drivers for a variety of common data acquisition plug-in boards. The drivers are implemented as a core Linux kernel module providing common functionality and individual low-level driver modules;
• Comedilib is a user-space library that provides a developer-friendly interface to Comedi devices. Included in the Comedilib distribution is documentation, configuration and calibration utilities, and demonstration programs;
• Kcomedilib is a Linux kernel module (distributed with Comedi) that provides the same interface as Comedilib in kernel space, suitable for real-time tasks. It is effectively a "kernel library" for using Comedi from real-time tasks.

here

DMM (aka Digital MultiMeter) is a data acquisition software that provides support for a range of Brymen digital multimeters/mobile loggers on SUS (POSIX) conforming operating systems (typically GNU/Linux, BSD and Unix). At the moment dmm is a command line interface, at some point in the future you might see a GUI, but for now the generated data should be easily usable in your favorite graphing program or spreadsheet. Some supported devices (using BC-85X or DMSC-9 rs232 interfaces) are;

Note: read carefully supported devices because some other interfaces which support these devices will not work with dmm (e.g. the BC-81X cable is not supported as it uses a non-rs232 serial protocol). For more informations click here.