Re: IOCs - What are the built-in device types?

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Dave,

The published output from my pull request documenting the built-in device support can be found here, beware any AI hallucinations or dragons that may be present. Review comments and suggestions can go here if you have any.

Hope it helps!

- Andrew

-- 

Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.

On 6/17/26, 11:14 AM, "Tech-talk" <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

Hi Dave,

Great question, unfortunate answer: The current documentation doesn’t really cover those other DTYPs. Many of the record types have some documentation on their own soft and raw soft channel support, and there were entries in the Release Notes for some of the newer device supports that were integrated. The list of device support layers provided by Base can be found in the dbd/devSoft.dbd file of any EPICS 7 release after building, and it’s worth doing a Google search for any specific layer you’re interested in, but you might end up having to read the source to get some specific details at the moment (or ask here).

I may follow up with something written by Claude Code, which I have asked to fill in those gaps.

- Andrew

-- 

Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.

On 6/17/26, 9:44 AM, "Tech-talk" <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

There are apparently built-in device types that provide various useful data sources:

  #  get the current time-of-day

  field(DTYP, "Soft Timestamp")
  field(INP,  "@%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S%z")

  # get the specified environment variable

  field(DTYP, "getenv")
  field(INP, "@ENGINEER")

Where can I find documentation of these built-in DTYP's?