Design and Development of a Diagnostics Client for a Beam Loss ...

Design and Development of a Diagnostics Client for a Beam Loss Measurement System at CERN
the required command payload is greater than one bit. Similarly, a toggle button is used
in case the payload of the command is one bit (On-Off state). In Figure 31, the static
commands tab is illustrated. In this Figure every component is disabled, because a con-
nection with a BLEDP server is not established. The tab groups similar commands inside
titled borders. For every group there is a “Get All” button. Since all these commands
refer to status elements, the purpose of the “Get” buttons is to update the textfields and
togglebuttons with the very last values of the status elements they refer to. These values
lie inside a dedicated buffer, which is updated every one second with the new incoming
status values. The buffer is protected against concurrent access when a “Get” button is
pressed. Furthermore, the “Set” and “Set All” buttons, inside the Potentiometers group,
fire a corresponding block of code, which is responsible for the structuring of the command
using the value in the textfield and then sending it to the server. In a similar way, a set
action in the other two groups is initiated by the dedicated togglebuttons.
Figure 31: Default outlook of the static commands tab.
Finally, inside the potentiometers group several checkboxes exist. If checked, a special
bit is activated inside the command byte buffer, which tells the server to write the incoming
command in the flash memory of the FPGA instead of the RAM.
Regarding the Advanced commands tab, it is created only in case a dedicated CSV file
is included in the project’s resources. This file contains all the information needed to
construct this tab. Figure 32 illustrates the outlook of the Advanced commands tab, when
a connection with a server is not initiated.
Each row of this panel implements an advanced command to the server. The payload
Emmanouil I. Angelogiannopoulos 46