Pointless Post
Todays post (the first for a long while) is brought to you by a free half hour before going for a budvar in Resteraunt 1. It concerns the unimaginative topic of today.
Today began on a slightly sour note with me oversleeping for about the millionth time and not meeting Dave and Bill for breakfast at CERN and so failing to hand over a chunk of metal i had muled out for them in my luggage. This part is a jig that will tell us whether a much larger part will actually fit inside the RICH iron shielding.
Anyway i was in CERN just before 9 and met up with Andrew Main, a slightly mad bowled playing Scots technitian who woks for Edinburg. The two of us are finishing of the last 6 production HPD columns. All the electronics and HPDs have been mounted on all 14 of these structures but things like the cooling plates need to be added and some final checks made.
The columns themselves are black annodised aluminium frames about 1.5m by 0.4m, one long side is armed with our shiny Hybrid PhotoDiodes (single photon sensitive imaging light detectors) and the frame itself is populated with the electronics to drive these beasts. Fully mounted it weighs about 40kg, with its cooling plate on 50kg.
We got the first column out of its reconstituted air (helium free) storage, slid it on its temporary rails into its transport frame and moved it to the pc with the ELMB boards attatched. They are used to erad out the temperatre sensors on the low voltage regulators, the only components that get really hot. The pt100 sensors have been mounted on the boards with the regulator chips and are squashed under the regulators heatsinks. In some cases too hard, hence we test them to see which are working. Today only 1 has failed (a victory for RICH1 as RICH2 has had a much higher pt100 failture rate.
We then draged the frame through to the other lab with the big table and layed it flat and connected it to the power fupplies and data aquisition pc. I powerd on the column whilst Andrew got on with some electronics for another part of the project. This took a little while as i had forgottoen to copy across the correct config files(these set voltage levels and account for slight variations in the chips manufacture), once i had done that it passed its JTAG checks (a low level io check) and was happily drawing ~16A. Then i tried to set up the DAQ system...
This took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon as it had been completely powerd down and some of the wires moved around by enthusiastic students. The main problems was i didnt know how to set up the pulse generators for the faked timing signal. After a RTFM moment i got it working and we checked thatthe column worked before we put the plate over the electronics.
Liver for lunch at R1 whihc was a bit stringy, i left some of it :(.
We then put the plate over the electronics, attatching the small heatsinks to it with a thermally condctive plactacine called thermagon. We screwed the 30 low profiel screws gently pusing the plate onto the thermagon and makigna good connection with the spikes of the heatsinks.
We then tested the DAQ again and found to our enormous relief that we had failed to break anyhthing, yomped the column and plate to the other lab, tested the temperature semsnors, no more of which had shuffeld off this mortal coil and heaved the whole thing back into the storage cupboard. Gas on lab locked and off for tea at 4:15.
I had hoped to do two columns but the pratting with the systems took most of my time.
We decided at tea to meet up again at 6pm (3mins away now) for a beer prior to a steak at the L'aviation steak resteraunrt.
No time for spell checking im afraid. Off for soem beer
Today began on a slightly sour note with me oversleeping for about the millionth time and not meeting Dave and Bill for breakfast at CERN and so failing to hand over a chunk of metal i had muled out for them in my luggage. This part is a jig that will tell us whether a much larger part will actually fit inside the RICH iron shielding.
Anyway i was in CERN just before 9 and met up with Andrew Main, a slightly mad bowled playing Scots technitian who woks for Edinburg. The two of us are finishing of the last 6 production HPD columns. All the electronics and HPDs have been mounted on all 14 of these structures but things like the cooling plates need to be added and some final checks made.
The columns themselves are black annodised aluminium frames about 1.5m by 0.4m, one long side is armed with our shiny Hybrid PhotoDiodes (single photon sensitive imaging light detectors) and the frame itself is populated with the electronics to drive these beasts. Fully mounted it weighs about 40kg, with its cooling plate on 50kg.
We got the first column out of its reconstituted air (helium free) storage, slid it on its temporary rails into its transport frame and moved it to the pc with the ELMB boards attatched. They are used to erad out the temperatre sensors on the low voltage regulators, the only components that get really hot. The pt100 sensors have been mounted on the boards with the regulator chips and are squashed under the regulators heatsinks. In some cases too hard, hence we test them to see which are working. Today only 1 has failed (a victory for RICH1 as RICH2 has had a much higher pt100 failture rate.
We then draged the frame through to the other lab with the big table and layed it flat and connected it to the power fupplies and data aquisition pc. I powerd on the column whilst Andrew got on with some electronics for another part of the project. This took a little while as i had forgottoen to copy across the correct config files(these set voltage levels and account for slight variations in the chips manufacture), once i had done that it passed its JTAG checks (a low level io check) and was happily drawing ~16A. Then i tried to set up the DAQ system...
This took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon as it had been completely powerd down and some of the wires moved around by enthusiastic students. The main problems was i didnt know how to set up the pulse generators for the faked timing signal. After a RTFM moment i got it working and we checked thatthe column worked before we put the plate over the electronics.
Liver for lunch at R1 whihc was a bit stringy, i left some of it :(.
We then put the plate over the electronics, attatching the small heatsinks to it with a thermally condctive plactacine called thermagon. We screwed the 30 low profiel screws gently pusing the plate onto the thermagon and makigna good connection with the spikes of the heatsinks.
We then tested the DAQ again and found to our enormous relief that we had failed to break anyhthing, yomped the column and plate to the other lab, tested the temperature semsnors, no more of which had shuffeld off this mortal coil and heaved the whole thing back into the storage cupboard. Gas on lab locked and off for tea at 4:15.
I had hoped to do two columns but the pratting with the systems took most of my time.
We decided at tea to meet up again at 6pm (3mins away now) for a beer prior to a steak at the L'aviation steak resteraunrt.
No time for spell checking im afraid. Off for soem beer