  The Analogue Hadron Calorimeter (AHCAL) developed by the CALICE collaboration
is a scalable engineering prototype for a Linear Collider detector. It is a
sampling calorimeter of steel absorber plates and plastic scintillator tiles
read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) as active material (SiPM-on-tile).
The front-end chips are integrated into the active layers of the calorimeter
and are designed for minimizing power consumption by rapidly cycling the power
according to the beam structure of a linear accelerator. 38 layers of the
sampling structure are equipped with cassettes containing 576 single channels
each, arranged on readout boards and grouped according to the 36 channel
readout chips. The prototype has been assembled using techniques suitable for
mass production, such as injection-moulding and semi-automatic wrapping of
scintillator tiles, assembly of scintillators on electronics using
pick-and-place machines and mass testing of detector elements. The calorimeter
was commissioned at DESY and was taking data at the CERN SPS at the time of the
conference. The contribution discusses the construction, commissioning and
first test beam results of the CALICE AHCAL engineering prototype.
