Using IPbus

Main Page -> Control & Readout Software Documentation and Howto's -> Using IPbus

Use case

IPbus is a control protocol that uses UDP/IP to send values into the registers on the readout unit (RU). The software on the host computer uses the Hardware Access Library (uHAL) to send the commands to the RU.

Configuration files

There is a main connection file (pRU-connections.xml), this file contains the address and port of the RU, for information on the content of the connection file please see the pRU Ethernet Configurations document.

Following there is a Module registers file (module-address.xml), this file contains a table with all the registers present in the RU.

Finally, there are files for each register

global_regs.xml
trigger_manager.xml
offload.xml
alpide_control.xml
alpide_data.xml

As of the writing of this page, these files can be found on the production_test repository in the ipbus branch under the BSP folder.

WARNING: To prevent undefined behavior the register files MUST match the firmware version!

Smart Dummy Hardware

To be able to read values from registers, a custom DummyHardwareUdp.exe can be built from this repository: IPbus Custom Repo NOTE: Remember to switch to the smartdummy branch.

This adds a file reader in the DummyHardware.cpp that reads a file in the directory of the executable, the file is called register-values.txt, an example file can be found here: Example file

How to Build on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Requierd packages

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install git g++ make erlang python3 python-is-python3 libboost1.71-all-dev libpugixml-dev

Building

In the directory where the repository have been downloaded:

$ make
$ sudo make install prefix=/home/user/ipbus-install

Adding paths to envirorment

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/user/ipbus-install/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$ export PYTHONPATH=/home/user/ipbus-install/lib/python3.8/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH

Running the hardware emulator

Change directory to ipbus-install/bin/uhal/tests NOTE: Make sure the register-values.txt file is present in this folder. Filename is in all lowercase.

./DummyHardwareUdp.exe -p 50001 -v 2 -V

Testing the emulator

From the production_test repo, in the folder tests_vcu118 run:

$ python test_ipbus_emulator.py

This should output 0xfeedbeef

Additonal information

For more information, please consult the IPbus wiki at: IPbus wiki