Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Pete Jemian <[email protected]> · Thu, 1 Mar 2018 11:06:03 -0600

Now I'm confused.

On 3/1/2018 10:46 AM, [email protected] wrote:

All the displays managers for Epics *look* far behind what is available
from commercial systems, say Schneider or Rockwell.  Which are themselves
far behind what programmers are doing today with, a modern operating
system or video games (also control interfaces).  And that's what we're
talking about right, at least in part, how it looks, or how we display
data?  Otherwise we could just use camonitor on a terminal with caput.

I think the key to having a decent display manager, one that adapts to new
technologies, better/different formats (say HTML5/PHP, Qt, text a la Lynx,
or some fancy Virtual Reality / VTK / QT3d initiative) is to have Epics
easily push/pull from a database (say MySQL, PostgreSQL).  Once that is
done one could use any language, any system, to control and display data
as long as said language or method can access a typical database.

As a side benefit to using a properly setup database one would
automatically get an archive, and the benefits of database
synchronization/backup, and seamless data compression.

(Also if someone is excited and jumping in to do this my vote is for
submitting it the Package Management Debian/Ubuntu repository.  I'm a
control systems engineer, and want to spend my time controlling systems,
not compiling very particular versions of modules, libraries, plugins, and
endless environment variables just to begin my work.)

My two cents & cheers!

James Richard Larsson

What is the value in adding an additional intermediate component, such

as a SQL database server, to solve the inadequacies of the various

existing display managers? That's a new piece of work for this

discussion. Each IOC already provides the data servers with a common

protocol. One can already use any language, any system, to control and

display data as long as said language or method can access an EPICS IOC.

Pete

--
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Pete R. Jemian, Ph.D.                 <[email protected]>
Beam line Controls and Data Acquisition (BC, aka BCDA)
Advanced Photon Source,    Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL  60439                    630 - 252 - 3189
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      Education is the one thing for which people
         are willing to pay yet not receive.
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System