Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Kay Kasemir) · Fri, 11 Jun 1999 13:44:00 -0600

Hello all:

I've just replied to Ron@SLAC but it seems there is more interest:

Yes, there is a CA server for LabVIEW, it's an ActiveX CA Server.
This implies:
* It's for WIN32
* It can serve data (via Epics Channel Access)
  from any application that is able
  to interact with an ActiveX Automation server,
  including-but-not-limited-to:
  LabVIEW, MS Excel, Visual Basic.
* It's versatile and easy to use,
  it's not the highest performance approach specifically written for LabVIEW.

I've created some LabVIEW VIs that allow easy access to this CA server.
At LANL/LEDA we currently have two PCs running LabVIEW that serve to CA through this method.
If you have an (existing) LabVIEW application and want to serve a few results
(scalars or arrays of short, int, single, double as well as enumerated types like booleans),
then this is a good idea.
If you have e.g. a digital oszilloscope that'll run out of the box
with LabVIEW and you want to serve that waveform,
this is a good idea again.
If you want to scan & serve thousands of PVs,
then using a standard Epics IOC is still the preferred solution
since LabVIEW cannot really do this.

In case you are still interested:
It requires the latest LabVIEW release 5.1 together with
an ActiveX bugfix (ax-events.dll) that's available either
from the NI website or would be included with the ActiveX CA server.

I also have a simple program that tries to sync the PC's clock
by querying an Epics master timing IOC (should be OK within 10ms).
For very accurate timing where the IOCs are sync'ed based on hardware events
we have no equivalent for the PCs.

After the LANL network was changed I don't know where I could
put the ActiveX Server so it would be accessible by everyone.
I could, however, put it on some ftp address that you tell me
or I could mail it, let me know.

Please feel free to ask more questions!

-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System