Introduction

The NewGen MIDAS data acquisition software is built around the use of Web technologies.

All graphical control is provided by a Web Browser interface. Additionally all MIDAS services provide a SOAP interface. Internally SOAP interfaces are used for communication between the software components.
Selected control actions are accessible to external software by the use of Curl.

For further reading see which contains links to various technical documents.

In the pages which you can select from the menu you will see various screen dumps taken from a Web Browser. If you click on the screen dump it will be displayed at full resolution. Use your browser back button or any of the topic items to continue.

As you move your mouse over the buttons on the various pages many will produce a short overlay giving more information on the purpose of the button.
Additionally many of the menu lists have a button labelled What is this? which produces a popup window to explain the use of the various menu items.

If not already done in order to install the software click on the left side menu item for Page B
If the software has already been installed then you can access the Project Page by viewing Page C

Connect your browser to lipc-1:8015 (or equivalent).
If you wish to use a browser running in a different system to that containing the data acquisition software (even your iPhone) then just replace lipc-1 by the name of the data acquisition system. There is however just one session for each port (8015) and data acquisition system.
You may have to modify Linux internal firewall settings since nowadays Linux does not by default permit any incoming IP connections.

See Page C 

The buttons are colour coded. 
   Green        important - must likely you will use these
   Blue         less important or less frequently used
   Orange       Rarely if ever used
   Pink         All screens have a set of Pink buttons for common browser functions
   Red          Documentation - either a popup window or a new tab screen containing text or a pdf file
Of special note is the Pink button Reset. This will cause the code for the page to be reloaded from its original location. Normally the page code is cached in the browser.
The Pink Button Reload will do simply that. However because most pages are dynamic it is possible that information displayed by the page has updated. Also when changing to a different page using the browser tab feature it may be useful to update the contents of the page.
On each screen look for a "How to use this page" button in the lower right hand corner. These are coming to help you.
Also some screens (for example the hardware module controls) have "What is this" buttons which explain the particular module register or feature.

All other red buttons will start documentation which may start a new tab (for example using a pdf viewer). When finished you may have to use the browser "back" button to continue.

V Pucknell; STFC; Daresbury Lab   updated March 2022