Re: Looking for feedback on what epics users require

[Ralph Lange <Ralph.Lange@bessy.de>]

Hello Pawel,

To connect to your power supplies through UDP on standard ethernet, you 
do not need to run the IOC on VxWorks. So-called "soft IOCs" run as a 
multi-threaded process on any "host side" OS, such as Linux (preferred) 
or Windows. If the only device connection of the IOC is through 
IP/ethernet, this solution is probably more flexible and efficient (many 
soft IOCs can run on a single machine), and a lot less expensive 
(inexpensive hardware, free OS). You could go as far as only supplying 
the software needed to create and run the power supply IOC on a machine 
the customer would provide.

If your systems are to be integrated into an existing EPICS based 
structure, most installations will have their own solution for display 
(panel) managers, alarm handlers, achivers etc., based on the variety of 
tools that are part of the EPICS toolkit. Creating some user interfaces 
that you ship with your IOCs is a good thing to do, but forcing your 
customers to use stuff that you supply would probably rather cause 
resistance, and (in the best case) your beautiful panels would just be 
not used.

Be aware that the Channel Access network protocol that people will use 
to integrate your IOCs is completely relying on channel names to 
describe hierarchies and - to some degree - properties. Any existing 
EPICS system will have a strict naming convention for channels, and any 
"foreign" IOCs with channels that don't follow that customer convention 
will cause a lot of grief and trouble when being integrated. You should 
try to create a solution that allows channel names to be adapted to 
customer naming schemes. This is not easy.
(IE in our case your "powersys:voltage" name would of course be 
completely unacceptable and be replaced by something like 
"Q3PD5R:rdVolt" - first part: device name, second part: channel name, 
both following strict conventions.)

Thanks for asking, (I mean it - please continue to ask!)
Ralph


On 10.03.2009 15:45 Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc. wrote:
> Hello,
>  
> My company is researching providing an epics IOC with some of our 
> power supplies. I would like to get some feedback from the epics 
> community on what exactly would be required. First let me start off by 
> saying that epics is still a new area for me so hopefully these 
> questions aren't dumb, we are still in the early research stages on this.
>  
> What we would like to do is provide a system with each device that 
> will host an EPICS IOC. This will be a vxWorks based system running 
> epics base 3.14. This system will communicate with our device using 
> ethernet and convert standard UDP commands that our devices work on to 
> process variables. So for example our clients would now have a process 
> variable they could use to monitor or set the voltage of a power 
> supply (IE: powersys:voltage).
>  
> For the client side we would like to develop a LabVIEW interface, we 
> would most likely not be developing a custom C/C++ application for the 
> client.
>  
> Would this be adequate for most epics users or would more be required 
> to integrate this into an existing epics network? Would people use the 
> LabVIEW client we develop or do most labs use their own custom 
> software to control/monitor epics enabled equipment? Any feedback from 
> the community would be greatly appreciated, thank you.