The PowerDAQ Software

The machine x1a has a UEIDAQ PD2MFS8-500/16 multifunction-board installed to read analog voltages from the picoammeters when doing shutter photodiode scans. The installation on SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional (as during the Jan 2005 installation of x1a) went as follows:

• Get the latest PowerDAQ drivers from http://www.ueidaq.com/download/ and save them in /usr/local/src. The current version as of Jan 2005 was 3.6.1.

• Make sure the kernel-source package is installed on your Linux system. This was the case by default on SUSE 9.2 (presumably because we had chosen to install the "developers" software category).

• Install as root by

      # cd /usr/local/src
      # tar xzvf powerdaq_linux_3.6.1.tgz
      # cd powerdaq-3.6.1
      # make
      # make install
      # make clean
  

  More information can be found in the INSTALL and README files once the tarball is unpacked.

• Now you should be able to load the pwrdaq kernel module by modprobe pwrdaq. When doing cat /proc/pwrdaq, it should show you information about the board installed.

• Make sure the pwrdaq kernel module is loaded automatically when the machine boots. This somehow happened automatically on SUSE 9.2, but if it doesn't, you have to insert modprobe pwrdaq in the local boot script (/etc/init.d/boot.local on SUSE). Do

      # lsmod | grep pwrdaq
  

  to check if the module is loaded.

Note that the compilation of the PowerDAQ software also succeeded on Fedora Core 3, but failed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS Version 3. I presume the reason for this is that RHEL 3 uses a hybrid Linux kernel (kernel 2.4 with some features back ported from 2.6), while PowerDAQ compiles only on pure 2.4 or 2.6 kernels (SUSE 9.2 and FC3 both use 2.6).

In Feb 2005, after a reboot, the machine x1a couldn't load the PowerDAQ driver. I presume that the reason was the following: After a YaST Online Update (the SUSE security and patch update), a new kernel was installed which got loaded after the reboot. The pwrdaq kernel module, however, gets installed into the modules directory of the current kernel (maybe it even gets compiled for a specific kernel version). The problem was solved by recompiling the PowerDAQ software as desribed above (since the package is still there and unpacked, you can start with the line cd /usr/local/src/powerdaq-3.6.1.

Some hints for some diagnostics before recompiling:

• Check if the powerdaq module is loaded by lsmod | grep pwrdaq.

• If it's not loaded, try modprobe pwrdaq.

• If that fails, get the current kernel version by uname -r. Then go to /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/drivers/misc and check if the file pwrdaq.ko is there. If not, you definitely want to recompile the PowerDAQ driver.