Re: How to monitor 700 thermocouples?

[Maren Purves <m.purves@jach.hawaii.edu>]

Rarback, Harvey wrote:
> 
>         Folks,
> 
> We need to monitor about 700 thermocouples for the SPEAR3 upgrade.  There will be about 40 TCs on 18 girders distributed around the 230m ring circumference.
> The present plan is to monitor the temperatures at a few second intervals.  We have a couple of quotes from PLC vendors, but they are fairly expensive.
> 
> Does anyone have a suggestion for hardware and software to accomplish our task?  Of course the aim is to get the temperatures into an IOC.

we use Lakeshore 208s (8 channel temperature monitors), don't know
whether Lakeshore has other units with more channels. Getting them into
EPICS is no big deal (terminal servers, serial lines), but 700 
temperatures is a lot - we currently monitor about 25.

Aloha,

Maren Purves