Implement robust configuration

Summary

At the moment any FE instability makes the "Configure", "Start" and "Stop" state transitions fail.

What is the expected correct behavior?

A robust configuration mode that ignores/bypassed/workarounds the communication instabilities should exist.

Possible fixes

Implement the following actions during state transitions:

• Initial:
  • All "hard" configuration loaded, i.e. xDAQ XML configuration, hardware layout tree,...
  • No interaction with other software components
  • No interaction with the hardware
• Initialize:
  • Establish the communication between the different relevant applications
  • No interaction with the hardware, i.e. no recovering of the back-end board
  • Duration goal: < 10 s
• Configure:
  • Recover the back-end boards
  • Prepare the front-end communication
  • Configure the back-end boards
  • No non-robust interaction with the FE
  • Provides a list of the chambers that can potentially be power-cycled, i.e. the ones that we already know will be disabled
  • No timeout
  • Duration goal: < 15 s
• Start:
  • Pushes the configuration to the FE:
    • Exists in both robust and non-robust mode
    • Non-robust mode fails for the first error encountered
    • Robust mode disables chambers for which an error is encountered (finer granularity to come later)
  • Reset the counters
  • Enable the events building and trigger
  • Duration goal: < 15 s
• Stop
  • No non-robust interaction with the FE