Reports until 17:38, Monday 01 February 2016
H1 TCS (TCS)
aidan.brooks@LIGO.ORG - posted 17:38, Monday 01 February 2016 (25300)
HWS SLED temperature sensor mystery solved. TEC is not working

The HWS SLED temperature (H1:TCS-ITMX_HWS_SLEDTEMPERATUREMON) has never read back correctly. I tracked down the problem to a missing wire in a 15-pin cable.

  1. The SLED driver chassis, (D1200600) expects to see the SLED temperature sensor (a 10K RTD) connected across pins 7 and 8 of the 15-pin D-SUB connector on the front (labeled SLED 1 TEC OUT for SLED1)
  2. Turns out the 15-pin DSub cable connected to this does not have a wire attached to pin 8 on the inside
  3. It does have a wire attached to pin 15
  4. Nothing was using pin 15, so I shorted it to pin 8 on the SLED driver chassis (S1301925) and made a note on the DCC.
  5. Lastly, on the other end of the cable, we changed the internal wiring of the Newport 742 diode mount such that the wire that was connected to pin 8 on the 15-pin Dsub connector is now connected to pin 15.

Lo and behold, the thermistor was correctly wired to the SLED driver chassis and now reads back a sensible temperature. What's more, turning on the SLED with 100mA going through it shows a 2.5C increase in temperature - as expected.

However ... I could now finally check if the SLED temperature changed as I changed the setpoint temperature to drive the TEC on-board in the diode package.

Changing the setpoint temperature had no response on the actual temperature.

I want to get this fixed as it will increase the lifetime and output power of the diodes.

(All of this was repeated for SLED 2).