News

January 22, 2007 Server and EDF processing application upgrade is under way.

November 9, 2004 Pass EDF XML schema and validator prototype implemented.

October 20, 2004 EDF database and hardware registry is designed using RDBMS Firebird 1.5 as a backend.

July 9, 2004 Graz EDF implementation is available in the download section

July 6, 2004 FTP site for the EDF is started.

EDF

EDF's are intended as an additional SLR data product containing a snapshot of the SLR station parameters which currently are not recorded in the Normal Points or published otherwise. The purpose of the EDF are described in more the details at the ILRS website and discussed at the workshops, see ILRS documentation . EDF uses XML based format which is defined with the W3C XML Schema, available in the download section. The data required to form an EDF can be divided in the three groups: required parameters, optional parameters and station custom data. The brief overview of the data, necessary to create EDF, is presented in the table below. Optional parameters are defined in the schema, but their use is up to the station.

EDF content overview

Item	Required data	Optional data
EDF epoch	Calibration epoch
Station data	Name, SOD, System change indicator (SCH), System Configuration Index (SCI), calibration method, timescale used (Name is just a station name, all other parameter values are defined by the ILRS)
Laser	Wavelength (nm), pulse width (ps) , energy (mJ)	Repetition rate (Hz), number of semitrain tracks, divergence (mrad)
Signal detector	Detector model, type	Device ID (here and further: unique number/name like serial number to distinguish devices in cases when multiple same model items are available)
Filter	Filter model, bandwidth (nm)	Device ID, filter transmission (%)
Timer	Timer model	Device ID
Meteo data	Temperature (Celsium), pressure (mbar=hPa), humidity (%)	Temperature (Celsium), pressure (mbar=hPa), humidity (%) from alternative (backup) source
Calibration	2-way value (ps) , RMS (ps), 1-way target distance (m)	Skew, kurtosis, sigma criteria used, peak minus mean, recorded points, accepted points, return rate
Custom data	Each station is free to add their own data here

Items marked as bold in the table above have predefined sets of allowed values. See documentation for the details.

EDF file naming convention: {Station name}_{YYYY}_{ddd}_{hhmm}.xml e.g. "Graz_2003_186_0118.xml","Potsdam3_2004_058_1712.xml" etc. where

Station name	Station name e.g. Riga, Graz, RGO
ddd	Day Of Year
hhmm	Calibration epoch: hours and min

EDF implementation at the SLR Potsdam

Each calibration run on the control PC updates a single data file in the shared directory on the server, which contains information about the given system calibration. Depending from the used timing device (SR620 or A031-ET counter), the files are stored in the corresponding directories: "ETData" for the Riga counter (A031-ET) and "SRData" for the Stanford. Each detector (Avalanche diode and PMT) has their own calibration history file hence each directory contains two calibration history files, which are renewed each year. File naming conventions: pmt_{yyyy}.dat and dio_{yyyy}.dat for the Stanford counter SR620 and pmt_{yyyy}.et and dio_{yyyy}.et for the A031-ET device. The file prefixes "pmt" and "dio" indicates corresponding detector devices - PMT and Avalanche diode. Also there may be situations when both counters are used simultaneously. Meteo data is stored also in the shared directory on the server, file met_all.dat and is updated each 10 minutes. For the EDF creation purposes the dedicated shared directory EDF was created where the additional output from the calibration process is stored which contains all necessary information in the two files, named "EDF_SR.dat" and "EDF_ET.dat" - one for each timer type (such a separation is due to the efforts to minimize changes in the existing software). The Perl program "GetCalib.pl" collects the data from these calibration history files and assemble single line files for the EDF creation process and stores them in the dedicated directory. "GetCalib.pl" stores information about the last processed files since last execution and process only the new records when they appears in the history files. In next step the MakeEDF.pl Perl script processes single line calibration files, reads meteo data from the server and creates corresponding EDF files and moves processed calibration files to the archive directory. The EDF creation script MakePotsdamEDF.pl invokes both utility scripts mentioned above: GetCalib.pl and MakeEDF.pl. The common functions are contained in the functions.pl file. All files are stored in the directory c:\slr\scripts. Script execution is controlled via two configuration files: slrsetup.ini and pot3edf.ini. The first one is for the setting script parameters (and eventually for the use with other SLR software as well) and pot3edf.ini describes station hardware in use. The location of the slrsetup.ini (full pathname) can be passed to the script as a command line argument or with the setting environment variable slr_setup. EDF relevant parameters in the SLRSETUP.INI:

Section [EDF]

• SourcePath - Path with the incoming files with the calibration data - d:\data\EDF\Incoming\
• TargetPath - Directory for the produced XML EDF files - d:\data\EDF\XML
• ArchivePath - Directory for the processed calibration data files - d:\data\EDF\Archive
• EDFSetupFile - Configuration file with the station hardware settings - d:\slr\Pot3EDF.ini
• MeteoData - Location of the meteo data - h:\meteo\met_all.dat
• CalibDataET - Calibration file for the A031-ET counter - h:\edf\edf_et.dat
• CalibDataSR - Calibration file for the SR620 counter - h:\edf\edf_sr.dat
• LastRunET - Last processed A031-ET calibration record epoch - 53061.4035300926
• LastRunSR - Last processed SR620 calibration record epoch - 53061.4035300926

Section [Programs]

• MakeEDF - Define script for the EDF producing - c:\slr\scripts\MakeEDF.pl
• GetCalibrData - Define script for the retrieving calibration data - c:\slr\scripts\GetCalibr.pl

Warning! The section and key names in the configuration files are case sensitive. The station hardware configuration files pot3edf.ini describes used SLR system hardware according to the EDF requirements and particular system configuration. To reference different counters and detectors the additional reference sections are used: [Timers] and [Detectors], where device sections can be located via the device indexes e.g. section [Detectors] contains two definitions: 1=SPAD and 0=PMT where numbers are detector type indicators as used in the already existing software and here they are pointing to the configuration file sections describing each device in detail.

Implementation notes

The EDF creation runs on the Windows NT 4.0 workstation under scheduler, so it's completely automatic, uses ActiveState Perl 5.8 and additional modules available from the CPAN/ActiveState. XML is generated using MS XML 4.0 parser, but it could be done as well taking EDF XML file as a template and using Perl string interpolation. Source code is available in the downloads section. While it's not directly usable as is outside Potsdam SLR station, we hope that it may help others to implement their own EDF creation routines. In future the EDF generation script can be easily updated to handle automatic uploads.