PySPARC is a data acquisition system for the HiSPARC experiment, implemented in Python. Ramon Kleiss came up with the excellent name.
Please note that this repository was, at first, by no means intended as a replacement for the LabVIEW DAQ we currently have in operation. It was merely intended as a test bed. Later, work was started on a MuonLab application. This was done to be able to remote control a running muonlab experiment. An event display is possible with an HTTP interface.
Currently, we're looking into replacing our LabVIEW / Windows PC setup with a Raspberry Pi running PySPARC.
I like the fact that we do not depend on FTDI drivers or closed-source libraries. We were using PyFTDI for HiSPARC III, but were running into strange problems. Pylibftdi / libftdi is proving to be a more stable combination.
Alpha, but getting there.
At the time of this writing (late 2017), there is renewed activity. We're testing this code on a few Raspberry Pi's with the goal of maybe replacing our old Windows PC's. They are a pain to maintain. The new effort focuses on adding support for primary/secondary combinations.
I (DF) was also planning on using this code to work out an event display and teaching materials for high school students. This will focus on the muon lifetime experiment. However, there already exists a LabVIEW interface and a new LabVIEW interface is in development for driving the Muonlab III hardware. This is not a priority anymore.
We use Ansible to keep all Raspberry Pi's up to date. Run the Ansible commands
from the directory containing the ansible.cfg
file. That is, the project
root directory.
To update all machines (dev and production), run:
$ ansible-playbook provisioning/playbook.yml
To update only the machines in the dev
group, run:
$ ansible-playbook provisioning/playbook.yml -l dev
You can use Ansible to connect to a raspberry pi and run a command. Like so:
$ ansible \* -a "supervisorctl status"
The \*
selects all machines. To limit the command to dev
boxes, run:
$ ansible dev -a "supervisorctl status"
We have created a vagrant development box for testing. To use it, first install vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com). For MacOS:
$ brew cask install vagrant
After installing vagrant, install the Virtualbox Guest plugin:
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
To start up the vagrant box:
$ vagrant up
The ansible playbooks and inventory include the vagrant box.
Perform the following steps:
Download the latest raspbian image from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ and rename it to
pysparc.img
. Place the image in the root of this repository, which makes it available to the vagrant VM. Unfortunately, it is not possible to use a Mac to have read/write access to the ext4 filesystem in the image. Note that we're not using the image as a VM! We're using the pre-existing vagrant VM to access the image file.Download the VPN certificate for the host newpi and place the certificate in the root of this repository as
vpncert.zip
.Enter the VM using:
$ vagrant ssh
Because the image is a full disk image containing partitions, it is slightly nontrivial. Setting up the disk image involves some work, as well. We've created a script which takes care of everything:
$ sh /vagrant/provisioning/provision_image.sh
You can now use this image for multiple installs.
In a shell, back on your Mac:
$ diskutil list /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *8.0 GB disk1 1: Windows_FAT_32 boot 58.7 MB disk1s1 2: Linux 3.2 GB disk1s2 $ diskutil unmountdisk disk1 $ sudo dd if=pysparc.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m $ diskutil eject disk1
Once the device has booted, it will install OpenVPN, unzip the
certificates and connect to the HiSPARC VPN network, as newpi
. Make
sure that you only boot one new device at a time, since otherwise multiple
devices will connect as newpi
, resulting in VPN disconnects. You
can simply logon using SSH, download the final certificate, unzip it and
restart OpenVPN:
$ cd /etc/openvpn $ sudo unzip <path_to_certificate> <choose overwrite all> $ sudo systemctl restart openvpn
The connection will be immediately dropped, but can be restored by connecting using the new hostname. Add the new host to the Ansible inventory file and run the playbook.
Run command across all pysparc installations:
(localhost) $ ansible pysparc -a "<insert command here>"
Query the NTP daemon:
$ ntpq -p
Scan for filtered NTP port:
$ sudo nmap -PN -sU -p ntp time.apple.com