Interactive Control Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to use the commandline tool to open an interactive terminal to control a PandA.

Connect

Open a terminal, and type:

pandablocks control <hostname>

Where <hostname> is the hostname or ip address of your PandA.

Type Commands

You should be presented with a prompt where you can type PandABlocks-server commands. If you are on Linux you can tab complete commands with the TAB key:

< PCAP.     # Hit TAB key...
PCAP.ACTIVE     PCAP.BITS1      PCAP.BITS3      PCAP.GATE       PCAP.SAMPLES    PCAP.TRIG       PCAP.TS_END     PCAP.TS_TRIG
PCAP.BITS0      PCAP.BITS2      PCAP.ENABLE     PCAP.HEALTH     PCAP.SHIFT_SUM  PCAP.TRIG_EDGE  PCAP.TS_START

Pressing return will send the command to the server and display the response.

Control an acquisition

You can check if an acquisition is currently in progress by getting the value of the PCAP.ACTIVE field:

< PCAP.ACTIVE?
OK =0

You can start and stop acquisitions with special “star” commands. To start an acquisition:

< *PCAP.ARM=
OK

You can now use the up arrow to recall the previous command, then press return:

< PCAP.ACTIVE?
OK =1

This means that acquisition is in progress. You can stop it by disarming:

< *PCAP.DISARM=
OK
< PCAP.ACTIVE?
OK =0

Conclusion

This tutorial has shown how to start and stop an acquisition from the commandline client. It can also be used to send any other control commands to query and set variables on the PandA.