Muon TPAR files

There is a soft IOC ( MUONTPAR ) which is used to load and edit the muon .tpar files, which are used by their scripts for temperature curve adjustments. This works by reading in “master” copies, set up by the scientists, and loading the contents of these into the current.tpar/current_booster.tpar files. These can then be edited by users, but their contents will never persist beyond the next configuration change (or IOC restart). This has an associated device screen to serve its contents over EPICS and allow editing through our GUI, but editing the file directly in another text editor is also an option.

Note

The IOC will only restart on a configuration change if the macros provided for the tpar files are different, otherwise the IOC (and any changes to the TPAR file) will remain. To work around this and load the master file’s contents, simply press the “reset to original” button in the device screen or restart the IOC manually.

The IOC works by using the FileContentsServer module, which takes an input and an output file.

The master copies and the current tpar files (current.tpar and current_booster.tpar) reside in \Instrument\Settings\ on muon instruments.

They are a custom format that are essentially space-separated files with a header for column names and then rows for values (much like a csv)

PVs are loaded in the IOC for the TPAR file names, but these are largely for script backwards compatibility - they previously read in the “master” file.