Development of an I2C(PMBus) - USB interface for ALICE Trigger Board (ATB) monitoring

The ALICE Trigger Boards (ATB) used in Run 3 contain two Power Management (PM) from where the outputs are read by a GPIO2 Texas Instrument (TI) device. The output is accessed by the Command Line Interface (CLI), sent into the DIM server and deployed to the SCADA WinCC dashboard. While operational, the system is slow and  customization is not feasible due to limited access to the CLI. 

 This summer student project goal was to create an I2C(PMbus) to USB interface that can be used with a range of I2C adapters. The interface is written on Python and implemented with the FTDI4232H chip as the adapter connected in placement of the TI device. The resulting interface is capable of reading outputs from the ATB and displays them on the DIM server as well as from the terminal according to the request from the user. The values in the DIM can later be deployed to the WinCC dashboard as it is done with the current TI device.

 The resulting interface can easily be modified for any other I2C adapter as well as other chips using PMBus protocol to send data.