Pomone, a PCI based data acquisition system

Pomone is a flexible read-out system, designed in the context of the BTeV pixel test beam, based upon a PCI-compliant board and a custom-built mezzanine card to accommodate different detector front-end components. The system consists of a rich set of C++ classes to provide the backbone functionalities needed to readout a pixel detector in a continuous mode, and a collection of GUIs to allow users to interact with all the hardware components. The system has been designed with a high level of generality in order to accommodate different kind of detectors as well as different event-building strategies. A detailed description of the system, running under the Linux platform, is provided, along with a discussion of specific solutions adopted to meet the requirements of efficiency and modularity posed by the design.