quadEM R3-1 now available

[Mark Rivers <rivers@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Folks,

quadEM R3-1 is now available.  It's only been a week since I released R3-0, but since then I have added support for the CaenEls AH501 series electrometers.  These are very fast 4-channel electrometers with up to 6.5 kHz updates on 4 channels, or 26 kHz updates on 1 channel.

This is from the release notes:

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- Added support for AH401D and the AH501 series (AH501, AH501C, AH501D) picoammeters from CaenEls. The AH501 series are significantly faster than the AH401 series. They work differently than the AH401 or APS_EM units, and do not support the concept of integration time or ping-pong. They have programmable resolution (16-bit or 24-bits), programmable number of active input channels (1, 2, or 4), and programmable bias power supply (AH501C and AH501D only).

- Added new record NumAverage. This applies to all models, and can be used to average NumAverage readings from the meter before doing the callbacks. On the AH501 series this also reduces the number of read operations by a factor of NumAverage, by increasing the number of messages read in a single operation. This reduces CPU time in direct proportion to NumAverage, which is particularly important with slow computers (e.g. older VME cards) with the AH501 series.

- Tested using UDP rather than TCP for communication with the AH401B and AH501 meters. This is more efficient than TCP, reducing CPU time by up to 10%. The example startup scripts now use UDP. The Lantronix DeviceInstaller must be used to configure the electrometer to use UDP, since the default is TCP.

- Added new record Model. This provides the model index and name of the device. This is determined automatically by the driver.

- Modified the medm screens so they only display the parameters that apply to the specific model being used.

- Modified startup scripts to simplify and support testing all models on any OS (for AH401 and AH501 series), and vxWorks for APS_EM.
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The home page is here:
http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/quadEM.html

The documentation is here:
http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/quadEMDoc.html

The release notes are here:
http://cars9.uchicago.edu/software/epics/quadEMReleaseNotes.html

Let me know of any problems or suggestions.

Mark