Hi guys,
Shortly my research group will be getting a big fancy set of CAEN VME nuclear instrumentation modules. It will be my job to write some C/C++ programs to control all of these modules.
That's about as far as I understand. I'm a C++ baby (I know some Java, C#, and FORTRAN), and I have no clue how exactly a VMEbus works. I imagine that I will be using the bus to access different memory locations on the modules and manipulate their settings, or something like that, but that's just my guess.
I have looked at a few VMEbus pages, but I don't know anything about masters and slaves, and I definitely don't know how to program C++ to interact with hardware like this. Unfortunately, this will be my task when the modules arrive, so I was wondering if anyone more familiar with the terminology involved here could point me to a few articles clarifying how a VME system works in laymans terms, and maybe some source code or a tutorial for interacting with such a system in C++.
Maybe every VME system is completely different to interact with. I'm not sure. CAEN claims to have some example code, but I haven't found it buried in the downloads yet. Could anyone be so kind as to spill some knowledge over on me and give me a gentle nudge in the right direction?
Thank you saints.