To archive a signal that ranges over many decades, separate the mantissa and exponent into two separate values, each to be logged.
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Pete R. Jemian, Ph.D. <[email protected]>
Beam line Controls and Data Acquisition
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL 60439 630 - 252 - 3189
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Education is the one thing for which people
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From: Tech-talk <[email protected]> on behalf of Kasemir, Kay via Tech-talk <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2019 8:51 AM
To: EPICS tech-talk; Bo Jakobsen
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] ai records with data covering many decades
Hi:
..PV for a pressure gauge which by nature covers many decades of values.
I wanted to set up MEDM and ADEL values before starting to log the values to our archiver.
Output is in exponential format, and i would like to monitor on e.g. 1 decimal independent of the exponent, it this possible.
I'm not aware of a good solution for efficiently displaying or archiving log-scale-type-PVs via MDEL respectively ADEL.
As you say, end users would like to see updates based on for example changes of "0.1", no matter if that's "0.1E-3" or "0.1E-5" on a log scale plot of vacuum pressure readings.
Sometimes the MDEL/ADEL is set to say "0.1E-5" because the reading happened to be in the E-5 range at the time, and then the vacuum improves to the E-6 range and MDEL/ADEL suppresses all updates.
So the only practical solution for archiving is to set ADEL=0, and store the value every few seconds to limit the amount of data. That's OK for the longer-term histor, but with vacuum readings you tend to care about some detail in vacuum excursions which start as a sharp spike, followed by exponential decay. With just a value every few seconds, you miss the initial spike detail.
Thanks,
Kay
