Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

People to Contact

The EPICS collaboration divides the tasks required to maintain the software in a fairly broad fashion. The following people should be able to help with questions in the indicated areas, or will point you to someone else who can help. For many technical questions the best and fastest way to get an answer is through the tech-talk mailing list.

Installation and Configuring

Building EPICS at a new site involves telling it where to find the various tools and software packages it needs, then running gnumake to compile everything. The current build system expert is Andrew Johnson.

Collaboration Meetings

Developers and users from the various EPICS sites gather together for a collaboration meeting generally about twice a year, circulating between the Americas, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. The Meetings page of this site gives details of past meetings including the presentations in most cases. Future meeting sites are selected by the EPICS Council (see below).

Training Courses

Various groups have run 1-week training courses in EPICS Application Development for their own staff, and courses are sometimes arranged adjacent to collaboration meetings when there is sufficient demand. Many of the materials developed for these courses are available online. There are also several consulting companies in the community that can provide training courses tailored to your needs, see the EPICS Sites page for pointers.

EPICS Council

Future development effort for the EPICS community is now coordinated by the EPICS Council. The current Council Chairperson is Karen White.

Core Developers

The major architects for development work on the EPICS Core software communicate through the core-talk mailing list, but also read the main tech-talk list.

Security Issues

The EPICS network protocols are not encrypted, thus EPICS should never be used on a network that is connected directly to the global internet. Neither of the Channel Access or PV Access designs were intended to provide protection against malicious attackers, and as such all EPICS control systems must include protection such as a network firewall to protect them from outside influence. With this caveat, security issues should be reported to one of the Core Developers or filed as a security bug in the bug tracker at Launchpad.

License Questions

Questions about license issues should be directed to Andrew Johnson.