Filter On Board

Plan for today: Continue implementing optional on-board coincidence filtering.

Ray and I couldn't visit CLC this morning, and he's busy tomorrow and I'm busy Friday, but he's going to go over there by himself on Friday.

Samad came by and we talked a little about the battery life analysis.  He is going to come by again next Tuesday so we can investigate the power draw for the DE3 board when running the GPS app.

Juan came by and recommended SVN for version control in Quartus (which I had asked him to investigate).  It costs money to get a private hosted server, but we could set up our own server on the xserve.  I asked Juan to investigate what ports are needed and ask Antony how hard it would be to get the ports open.

Juan is going to see if he can run Quartus under VirtualBox on the center Mac, and access the Quartus license server through wireless via our router.  However, when he tried accessing the Internet through the wireless connection, it was only working sporadically for some reason.  We added the DNS hosts, but it still had problems.

Juan found that SourceForge supports private SVN repositories, so we are probably just going to use that.

I finished my changes to the pulse-buffer module in the firmware (pulsebuf.{h,c}) to support on-board coincidence filtering.  Compilation of this new version of the code is enabled by defining the FILTER_COINS preprocessor symbol in pulsebuf.h, and we can revert to the old version of the code easily by commenting out that line (leaving FILTER_COINS undefined).  The new version adds only about 1K to the code size.  It still fits!

Can't do a test right now, because I think Ray may still be in the middle of collecting coincidence data.  Speaking of that, the SciLab run I started yesterday to count coincidences in that million-line dataset is still running!  It's at 23,657 coincidences so far, but it is just CRAWLING!!!  This just goes to show how doing the coincidence filtering in real-time on the board will be much better...

Anyway, I'll test my new code next time I'm here...  Probably next Monday PM.