Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Maren Purves <[email protected]> · Thu, 1 Mar 2018 10:27:14 -1000

On 03/01/18 06:01, Jameson Graef Rollins wrote:

At LIGO we're pretty stuck with MEDM just because of the sheer amount of
work required to translate and test all of our existing screens.  This
problem exists no matter which new system we eventually decide to move
to, so a requirement for any new system is a good translator.

We're in a similar situation at the JCMT (running medm) - where UKIRT
(the other telescope we're supporting) is still at edd/dm (! - which
I'm not even going to try to compile for CentOS6 and/or 64 bit, RHEL9
(I think it was) was difficult enough), and dozens of displays for
each. With a software staff (on this end of things) of about 2 3/4
we don't have the effort to convert stuff unless there is a good
script to do it for us (which I believe there is for medm).

We have some perl and Python displays, but mostly for small systems.

On 03/01/18 06:46, [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).

We had somebody apply for a job in this group at some point
who was suggesting that we should rewrite everything "more
modern" - which IMHO disqualified that person for that job
immediately. Our systems have to work 24/7/365 unless we're
closed for weather and that takes pretty much all the effort
we have.

Why reinvent a working wheel?

Maren
(hoping to get both telescopes to a display manager that will still
work with CentOS7 and 64 bit architecture at some point, before we
run out of spare hardware that will still run e.g. CentOS5)

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System