Minutes of CALICE Electronics Phone Meeting, 19/01/04
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Present at RAL: Adam Baird, Rob Halsall, Osman Zorba
Present at Imperial: Dan Bowerman, Paul Dauncey, Catherine Fry
Present at UCL: Martin Postranecky

Minutes: Paul


Matters arising: The CompactFlash cards and reader have not yet been ordered;
 the cards will be 128MBytes and should cost ~20 pounds each.

 The QDRs are expected "sometime this week", probably on Thu 22 Jan. As Dave is
 not close to being limited by these for the BE work, we should wait until
 after the VFE tests in Paris before installing them.

 The NIM-LVDS has still not been checked at RAL.

 The description of the ADC twos-complement range in the last set of minutes
 was checked and is correct.

 Adam checked the VFE polarities with Julien Fleury and the two boards should
 be matched in their differential ranges. There is a DAC problem on the VFE
 also so we might not need/be able to use the full DAC range there anyway.
 Julien has said he would hope to get VFE PCB A to us by the end of the week,
 i.e. arriving around Mon 26 Jan. Paul asked him about power; it needs +6V,
 -6V and -5V.


Hardware status: Matt has previously reported on some problems he had found.
 CERC S/N 1 has a problem with the clock cutting out after several seconds.
 A couple of the LEDs also do not work and are probably mounted the wrong way
 round. S/N 2 does not boot properly on power-up and almost always has to
 have the CompactFlash card removed and replaced.


FE status: Osman is gearing up for the sine wave test with the ADCs. He has
 not completed imbedding Matt's code into his yet. He is aiming to do the
 sine wave test this week. He will ask for software support from Paul, etc,
 on a day-to-day basis.

 Paul would like to see the latency measured soon as this is an issue which
 is causing concern within CALICE.


BE status: Nothing has been heard from Dave recently.


Software status: Paul did a mini soak test on Matt's RS232 code, reading
 out 1500 events over several hours. This involved 1.5M 8-byte packets out
 and their replies. No error was seen.


Paris organisation: Paul asked everyone who may go to Paris to send him
 the information requested by Jean-Charles Vanel and listed in the previous
 minutes.


Next Meeting: Not defined; we need to ensure Dave Mercer can
 attend; Paul will contact him.