Something is wrong with ITMX HWS. I need help from experts.
As I wrote yesterday (26185), because the HWS codes were not running, I had restarted both ITMX and ITMY HWS codes. Today I checked the output, in particular the spherical power, and noticed that the noise level was way too high (+/- 200 uD !). I restarted the code with a new reference image to see if it helps, but it actually made the noise level worse. Now it fluctuates as big as 0.03 uD. Looking at the camera image itself, I saw a beam on the center and assumed that it was the right one. Also I steered the ITMX compesantion plate (which is now intentionally steered by approximately 500 urad due to the green view port issue, 26164) back to the zero-offset angle, but this did not help at all. The laser power has dropped to 1.1 mW which used to 1.4 mW on March 1st (25806), but I believe that this should not increase the noise level such drastically.
One suspicious thing I found is the number of centroids which now reads only 65. In the past it was 400. In summary, I have no idea what has gone wrong.
I logged into H1HWSMSR and investigated the problem. As a first step, I looked at the archived HWS images directly. For reference, these are stored in the /framearchive folder and are .raw images. The images contain no header and are literally just a file containing the intensity of each pixel in 16 bit format. An can be read into an array in MATLAB using the following code snippet.
fid = fopen('1142711735_hws_avg_image.raw', 'r');arr = fread(fid, [1024,1024],'uint16');fclose(fid);The problem seems to be corrupted images coming in from HWSX. See the bottom of the image in the attached example. I downloaded five images from random times over the last 24 hours and found they all exhibited the same problem.
I'm not aware of any code changes to the way the HWS images are read into the computer. There is a report of 1 zombie process on H1HWSMSR, so it may be worthwhile trying to reboot the machine but at the moment, I'm not sure why the images are now corrupted.
I'll investigate further.