Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Mark Rivers <[email protected]> · Wed, 9 May 2001 07:50:07 -0500

Chris,

First, I don't think the NSLS is using the "steppermotor" record, they are
using the "motor" record, written by Tim Mooney from APS.  This is what we
use at the APS, and also at X-26 and X-17C at the NSLS.  The "motor" record
has many more features than the "steppermotor" record, and the OMS device
support has had a lot of work done on it.

Second, are you using the raw "ca" library from EPICS base?  If so, then it
is much more work than you want, since you need to worry about callbacks
when things change, etc.  I would recommend using the "ezca" library, which
is very simple for most applications.

You don't want to use the ".h" file, you just need to know the names of the
relavent fields.  In the motor record these are motor.VELO for the velocity,
motor.MRES for the resolution, motor.TWV for the tweak value, etc.  There is
Web documentation of the motor record and its fields.

If it would help I have an IDL class library for the EPICS motor record, so
you can do things like:

x = obj_new('EPICS_MOTOR', 'X1A:x_stage')
x->move, 100, /relative
x->set_velocity, 2.5

To know if you are using the "motor" or "steppermotor" records do the
following:
- Get a connection to the VME crate console, either via serial port or
telnet.
- Type the command 
  dbl "motor"

  If you are running the motor record it will give a list of all the motors.

Cheers,
Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System