Report on a field-portable VME-based distributed data acquisition system

A field portable data acquisition system has been developed around a VMEbus based micro-processor and standard TCP/IP network protocols. The hardware consists of a compact VME crate and a single CAMAC crate containing the signal processing electronics. The component processes of the data acquisition system transfer control and event data over a set of TCP/IP socket connections. The use of network sockets for the interprocess communications allows the data acquisition system to be operated transparently on one workstation or on a number of workstations distributed around a local network