Silicon Tracker Daughter Board

In order to allow the readout of a silicon strip module assembled with a Tracker Turicensis hybrid (4 Beetle chips) with the Alibava system (2 Beetles), a daugther board STDB and a adaptor board STDBAdaptor has been developed. It is very important to note that the TT hybrid uses Beetles version 1.3.

The STDB adapt the 34-pin IDE alibava connector to the 80-pin AVX TTHybrid connector, manual selection of 2 over 4 beetles and allow external beetle i2c programming.

Alibava’s software and hardware are designed to work with two Beetles. As we use a TT-hybrid with 4, we need a way to select the pair of Beetles that we will read. We have to choose the firmware, namely 0x10-0x12.mcs and 0x14-0x16.mcs, and then accordingly set the switches in the STDB. There are leds near to the switches to show which address we are selecting. Although each switch has 6 different selectors, all must be switched together. There is a red button with a red led, which allow us to cut the Beetle’s power.

The STDB provides a 4-pins port where we plug the I2C bus from Arduino board, or the oscilloscope. Below a screenshot of a reset command sent to Beetle 0x16 from Arduino.

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