In General, the operation of the trigger is simple and straight forward. Any reconfiguration of the trigger should have been performed well ahead of time and in consultation with the Hall A Trigger Manual (the XTrigMang manual is on the web).
In most cases an operator will only need to download a trigger settings file. The trigger is controlled through a program called ``XTrigMang''. At present this can be executed from within the adaq account, change to the $EXPERIMENT/trigger directory. Then execute XTrigMang, which reads four files; ``trigger.conf'', ``trigger.map'', ``trigger.settings'' and ``X.map''. ``X.map'' defines the placing of buttons on the gui windows of XTrigMang. ``trigger.map'' defines the logical name of every module in every slot in the CAMAC crates. ``trigger.settings'' is the settings of the modules (discrimenator levels, delays, logic-gates, MLU patterns, etc.). ``trigger.conf'' is a file in which the names of the other three files can be changed.
XTrigMang is build around five types of action, which can be performed on one module at a time or all modules simultaneously. The five actions are: 1) and display the data-base which is in memory, 2) (modify or edit) the data-base, 3) what is in the crate, 4) that the crate and data-base match, 5) the setting in the data-base to the crate. The user can also , ie. write the data-base to the disk file for future use.
After starting XTrigMang the top level organizational window, as shown below, will appear. If everything was configured as desired one can simply click on the button at this point. The button will remain ``depressed'' until the download is finished. It is generally a good idea to check the download with a . This will read back all the settings from the crate and check them against the data-base. Both download and verify can take a minute or so if the patterns in the MLUs are complex. ``Verify All'' lists only the modules in which the settings in the data-base are different from the settings read from the crate. Most of the time the ``Verify All''(see figure below) will be blank, in that case the trigger is ready to use. If the window is not blank see trouble-shooting below.