Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Marty Kraimer <[email protected]> · Fri, 08 Nov 1996 14:24:07 -0600

It has been several weeks since a message has been sent about
adding RAWL, RAWH to the ai and ao records. Thus I am assuming
that everyone who had a strong opinion has responded.
This message attempts to summarize the responses.

The majority of the responses did not think it is a good
idea to add these fields. Perhaps the best reason is that
given by an Application Developer. The response was:

    Q. What am I supposed to put in the RAWH and RAWL fields ?
    A. You might not have to put anything in there, but then again, you might.

    Q. How do I know ?
    A. It depends on the device type you are using.

    Q. My device type is thisDeviceHere. Do I need to worry about it ?
    A. You have to ask the author of the device support.

    Q. Who's that ?
    A. < no answer >

Several other negative responses were given by device/driver developer's.
The comments indicated that RAW/RAWH are only sometimes a problem and,
in any case, a small subset of the problems. Thus adding these fields
will not be much help. A couple of responses indicated that for particular
cases they are a big help.

Several device/driver developers stated that they used the parm field
(often with INST_IO which has only a parm field) to solve their problem.
The responses also showed that the parm field needed a lot of syntax
associated with it in order to solve the problem.

Several responses stated that we need a hardware configuration tool.
This is something we have realized for a long time but have never been
able to get a consensus on what it should be or do.

As a result of the RAWL/RAWH discussion I also got a message from Ralph Lange
that gave some ideas he and several other people at BESSY came up with when
they discussed the hardware configuration problem.
This lead to several E-mail messages between them, a few LANL developers,
and a few APS developers.  Maybe this may lead to something.
I will send the last E-mail I sent on to them. No one responded
to it so that means that either everyone was getting tired or else
there was no basic disagreement.

Marty Kraimer

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System