February was a month of very intensive work to prepare our straw detector and Data Acquisition System for tests with proton beam from COSY accelerator at Juelich Forschungszentrum in Germany.
Together with 5 other groups we had granted one week of beamtime to evaluate the detectors, electronics and software.
It was the first time we evaluated operation of the entire, small scale detector system for PANDA experiment. Three detector subsystems: Forward Tracker, Electromagnetic Calorimeter and Time-of-Flight, each with their own readout system, were synchronized with SODANet system and generated data was processed by a set of 3 Compute Node modules for burst building and preliminary preprocessing.
Rack with Forward Tracker and EMC readout electronics Beamline with all subsystems installed Patch panel with optic fiber connections and ZCU102 board connected as the preprocessing system
It was also the possibility to test the data preprocessing system based on Xilinx ZCU102 platform. The board receives data streams from the digitizing boards and recovers track candidates, rejecting empty events.