Scraps of text for incorporation in the VIS Meeting Minutes

KAGRA/Subgroups/VIS/MeetingNAOJ

Type B (Mark)

Report for the week of 4/15

• Fabian debugged a dead stepper on SR3 (broken driver channel) and a dead geophone on SRM (unplugged cable). He made another update to the table used by the Python script for the stepper driver MEDM screen to reflect the remapping.
• Fabian monitored the pumpdown and he and Hirata-san did post-pumpdown checks of all the suspensions. They were all healthy.
• Hirata-san participated in the health checks and learned about the computer systems.

• Mark did major revisions to the MEDM menu on the OVERVIEW screen with scripts for making safe.snap files and snapshots of setpoints. He made the safe.snap files in directories under /opt/rtcds/kamioka/k1/target into symbolic links to files in /opt/rtcds/userapps/release/vis/k1/burtfiles, alongside the setpoint files, so that they could be backed up to the SVN (as at LIGO).

• Mark did major updates to his vistools.py Python package for manipulating the suspensions (based on his LIGO sustools.py). He added entries for Type B suspensions to the internal database and added commands for manipulating SET and DCCTRL blocks. He also added commands to simulate pressing on the CLEAR HISTORY and LOAD COEFFICIENTS buttons.

• Mark started updating the TYPEB.py Guardian definition file to use vistools.py. So far only the ENGAGING_IP_CONTROL state has been fully rewritten and tested, but other states will be simple adaptations. It should be easy to do Type A and other Guardians in the same style.

Report for the week of 4/22

• Fabian debugged an anomaly he found in the SRM (klog 8672) and found it was OK if the BF was high enough (klog 8733).
• Mark and Terrence worked on improvements to the Guardian and the vistools.py package.

  • We debugged a problem where vistools.py triggered channel access timeouts when a Vis object was created in a live Guardian (it worked fine in a plain iPython session or the interactive mode of the Guardian). It turns out that in the live mode of the Guardian, the Ezca instance used for accessing the suspension is not a global variable (contrary to the documentation) but is associated with the GuardState class. Worse, creating a second Ezca instance upsets things. We came up with a workaround to grab and reuse the Ezca object already defined.

  • Mark added many new functions to vistools.py, including one to read the BIO WD status, and a group to manipulate the OLSET and OLDCCTRL filter blocks.
  • Terrence rewrote the TYPEB.py Guardian from scratch in terms of functions from vistools.py.
  • We removed the RESET state.
  • We renamed the DCCTRL_ONLY state to FLOAT and reimplemented it to switch the DCCTRL INPUT switches off (instead of the HOLD switches on).
  • We revised the OL_DAMPING_ENGAGED and neighboring states (ALIGN, MISALIGN etc).
  • We changed the RTMs to remove the TM_OSEM_DAMP blocks and to have the SET blocks connect only to the DCCTRL blocks (not the DAMP blocks).
  • We updated the PAYLOAD and OVERVIEW screens to reflect the RTM changes. We also fixed some broken links and fields related to the BIO functions.

Plan for week of 4/29

• Glorious 10-day break!

Vacation/Travel Info

• Terrence's next visit from 4/18 to 7/27.
• Fabian's vacation 4/25 to 5/10.
• Mark's US vacation from 5/22 to 6/11.
• Mark's final day 6/28.