Speaker
Description
Integrating machine-vision system cameras in an experimental setup can be a tedious and perilous process. First, there is the challenge of adapting a commercial solution to a slightly different environment or mission than the one for which it was originally designed. Second, the design may involve both commercial and internally built hardware and software, with all pieces required to be compatible and interoperable. Furthermore, since separate engineering teams usually develop and deploy the different layers of the final architecture, this could easily lead to miscommunication when defining the various interfaces, configuration and even operational settings and parameters. As a result, failures may occur on various layers in the resulting architecture. At the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, such cameras are used, among other things, to monitor the profile of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser beam, but also for modeling purposes. A custom data-acquisition solution that includes an in-house developed frame-grabber board has been developed to interface with those cameras. The primary motivation of a custom solution is the integration of the timing system into the camera readout. In essence, the LCLS timing system is used by firmware to trigger the camera, but also to construct events consisting of camera image data, along with the associated timing information. In this paper, we present a summary of this work from a primarily software perspective.
