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CERN has experience of using MacVEE Plus systems in the laboratory for
data  acquisition,  experiment  control and monitoring, as well as for
equipment development and test.

MacVEE  (Microcomputer  Applied  to  the  Control  of  VME  Electronic
Equipment) provides direct memory-mapped access from the Macintosh (or
Macintosh Plus) to up to 8 VMEbus crates, or up to 7 VMEbus crates and
8  CAMAC  crates  via  Mac-CC,   a  dedicated  Macintosh  CAMAC  crate
controller.

Small physics experiments have been successfully  completed  in  which
the  only  computer  used  was a MacVEE system with CAMAC.  At a large
experiment, such as UA1 at the proton-antiproton  collider,  the  data
acquisition  itself  is performed by a distributed system of 65 VMEbus
CPUs and 134 other VME/VMXbus modules, and a dozen MacVEEs are used in
the control room for the programming, control and monitoring of these.

One MacVEE at UA1 is dedicated to  perform  as  the  data  acquisition
console,  and  it  also carries out automatically the functions of the
old experimenter's log book (recording all operator commands, selected
histograms,  diagnostics  etc).  Other MacVEE systems are used for the
control of trigger processors comprising farms of SLAC/CERN  emulators
of  IBM  mainframes  (six  168  and  six  3081)  through  their VMEbus
interfaces.

In a MacVEE system, the selected  external  VMEbus  or  CAMAC  address
space  simply  appears within the address space of the Mac's 68000, so
that no special drivers  are  required  to  access  it.  User-vectored
interrupts  from  VME  can  be  handled,  as  well  as  CAMAC LAMs.  A
composite video signal output is provided  for  use  by  remote  video
monitors.

Mac-CC is equipped with a standard auxiliary controller  bus  (like  a
type  A2  crate  controller)  allowing multiple controllers in a CAMAC
crate, and operates in conjunction  with  standard  LAM  graders.  The
MacVEE  VMEbus  interface  module  has system controller capability as
well as allowing multi-processing in the VMEbus crates.

The introduction of the Macintosh has  led  to  some  interesting  new
approaches  to  providing  interactive  user  interfaces to laboratory
experiments.  For example, when a data acquisition MacVEE detects  any
abnormality   in  the  statistics,  it  highlights  the  corresponding
histogram  on  its  multi-histogram  display  (and  outputs  a  speech
message).

To obtain more detailed information, the operator just has to click on
a  chosen  histogram  with  the  mouse to see an expanded display with
additional diagnostic data.  It proves much easier for the  physicists
on  shift to master this type of user interface to a complex apparatus
than to have to remember  the  sequences  of  a  conventional  command
language.

A total of 176 MacVEE systems are currently in use.  I can  provide  a
limited   number  of  copies  of  the  MacVEE  User  Manual  to  other
professional researchers.


B.G. Taylor
EP Division
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland

Bitnet:  bgt.wb@gen
Arpanet: bgt.wb%gen.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
Usenet:  bgt.wb@gen.bitnet.uucp