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Reports until 23:51, Friday 14 August 2015
H1 GRD (GRD, ISC)
sheila.dwyer@LIGO.ORG - posted 23:51, Friday 14 August 2015 (20545)
changes to ASC engaging in guardian

Ed, Gabriele, Sheila

We had three locklosses in a row while engaging ASC.  I've rearranged the ASC_ENGAGE state in the gaurdian, breaking it into three separate states.  

ENGAGE_ASC part1 does the set up, turns on CHARD, checks the recylcing gain.  If the recycling gain is OK, it engages PRC2 and INP1, other wise it gives a message to align by hand and will not move on.  This logic was in the old state, but it did not stop to wait for by hand alingment.  Once the recyclcing gain is high enough, the guardian will engage PR2 and INP1, so the user may want to pause the gaurdian if aligning by hand. 

ENGAGE_ASC_PART2 increases the gain for the SRC loops, this part used to be done after engaging PRC1 but we tested this and it is fine.  Then it checks the POP offsets, and if they are small enough it engages the PRC1 loop.  Otherwise it gives the user a message again, and keeps checking the offsets.  It will move on if the drop below the threshold, so if you are aligning by hand you may want to pause the guardian. 

ENGAGE_ASC_PART3 engages the SOFT loops.  There is a place hoder here to check the offsets and not engage if they are too large.  I put this in because sometimes we are loosing lock when engaging these loops, however based on the last lockloss it wasn't obvious how to set a threshold, so currently there is no check, they will always be turned on.  As we collect some data while running next week we can look at these locklosses and set an appropriate threshold.  

The main motivation for doing this is because the checks that we had previously written weren't really being used (the guardian would move on, just leaving the PRC loops off, but this might not be obvious to the user).  A secondary benefit is fewer blocking calls so that we will check for locklosses in places where we used to miss them.  

We tested this once, but did parts of the PART2 state by pasting into the command line.  The only untested change is turning on the ITM offloading to the top mass in when we first turn on DHARD.  Now we are both turning on the offloading and setting it to the full gain in the state DARM_WFS.  (lines 1052 to 1056 used to be near the end of the engage ASC state).  #guardbomb

The other thing to note is that the OFFLOAD_ALIGNMENT state generators are no longer requestable.  I've been slowly trying to reduce the number of requestable states so that we have options that we need in the drop down menu, and fewer options that shouldn't be used. 

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