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Explicitly mention that the DSP module downsamples data. Give maximum…
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… supported filter frequency.
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Lovell, Jack J committed Dec 12, 2016
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9 changes: 8 additions & 1 deletion software/swguide.tex
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Expand Up @@ -108,6 +108,13 @@ \subsection{Voltage Measurement}
frequency noise components are less suppressed. A helper script exists to calculate the appropriate filter coefficients for a given bandwidth, and load
them onto the FPGA (see Section~\ref{sec:lpfdesign}).

The process of time averaging over multiple periods means it is no longer necessary to sample at a high enough rate to resolve the AC excitation
waveform. Instead, we only need to sample at a high enough rate to resolve amplitude (and phase) fluctuations below the cutoff frequency of the filter
used to perform the time averaging. Bolometer sensors naturally suppress high frequency signals due to the thermal properties of the sensor, so the
signal-to-noise ratio gets very low at higher frequencies. The BOLODSP module on the FPGA downsamples the output data by a factor of 100. This
means that for an input sampling rate of 1MSPS (the maximum sampling rate of the BOLO8BLF), data will be output at 10kSPS\@. This means that the FPGA
filters should be set to a maximum of 5kHz, though in practice there is little point going above about 1.5kHz.

\subsection{Voltage Offset}
\label{sec:offset}
No sensor is perfect, in the sense that the bridge will never be perfectly balanced in the absence of any input power. Likewise, no electronics is perfect,
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -318,7 +325,7 @@ \subsubsection{DIODE{\_}DROP{\_}V}
\subsubsection{FILTER{\_}BANDWIDTH}
As mentioned in Section~\ref{sec:voltage}, the choice of filter affects the trade-off between noise levels and time resolution. The filters themselves are
designed using helper scripts (Section~\ref{sec:lpfdesign}). Those scripts take the value of this knob to design a filter with a given bandwidth. The
bandwidth should be specified in Hz.
bandwidth should be specified in Hz. The maximum supported bandwidth is 1950Hz for use with the filter helper scripts.

\subsubsection{THEAT}
This value, in seconds, specifies the length of time spent ohmically heating the sensor during calibration. It should be long enough to ensure the sensor
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