On Thursday & Friday, Sachin was visiting from BNL. He gave his talk on Thursday, and on Friday we worked with him in the lab to get his front-end board connected up with our setup. The board seemed to be drawing more power than Sachin expected (over an amp) and we were not quite sure why. Ray found an old ByteBlaster cable and we managed to load the firmware through Quartus on Mike's PC (which had a parallel port). But the board's USB driver wasn't compatible with Vista, so to communicate we used XP under VirtualBox on one of the Macs instead. We had some trouble getting the USB device to be recognized there at first too, but Juan came in & helped to resolve it. The team got to the point where they were able to remotely access the board's control registers through the LabView interface, but it turned out that the USB port under VirtualBox wasn't fast enough to handle the desired rate of data streaming. So we will probably have to buy a dedicated XP box for purposes of interfacing to the board.
This week, Mike was out Mon.-Wed. due to an eye surgery. On Wednesday, Gordon emailed that he would probably be unable to do the graphs in Scilab on time, and that Mike should probably just do them instead. Mike replied asking if Gordon could reformat the latest raw data files at least.
Last week I checked the paper deadline for the SPIE Orlando symposium; it is March 28th, so we have a few weeks still, so we'll probably be OK.
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