Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Bruce Hill <[email protected]> · Wed, 28 Feb 2018 01:40:56 -0800

The primary change that Kukhee is proposing involves
changing NUM_TIME_EVENTS in epicsGeneralTime.h to
a larger number.    This affects an array size in epicsGeneralTime.c
and allows larger event numbers to be requested via
 epicsTimeGetEvent()

There's also a related change in dbScan.c changing an
array of cached event_list ptrs from 256 to NUM_TIME_EVENTS.
This is used by the deprecated post_event() call to do the
string to event_list lookup once for each event number.

Assuming your timing system calls post_event or the newer
postEvent when timing events are received, that's the tie-in
between the TSE and EVNT fields which allows you to process
records when a timing event occurs and use TSE to fetch the
corresponding timeStamp.

I've posted a pull request to github w/ the above change:
https://github.com/epics-base/epics-base/pull/11

Re the TSE field changing from a short to a string:
I think what we're pointing out is that it's inconsistent to
make EVNT a string but leave TSE as a short int.

Making this change would require the same support for
converting compatible strings to event numbers or changing
epicsTimeGetEvent() to also use a string for the event arg.

We're probably going to continue setting those fields to
numbers whether the field is a short int or a string,
as that's what our users and gui's are setup to handle.
We haven't found a good way to describe all the timing
options for our new timing triggers as either an integer or
a string, which drove our request to bump NUM_TIME_EVENTS,
adding unused event numbers which we'll map to trigger
output channels.

Cheers,
- Bruce

On 02/26/2018 02:18 AM, Dirk Zimoch wrote:

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System