Acromag Octal serial port

["W. T. Waggoner" <bwaggoner@creighton.edu>]

Hi,

One of our newer subsystems at STAR (Brookhaven National Lab) has purchased
us a Acromag AVM- 9660 carrier board and a Acromag IP520-64 Octal
EIA/TIA-232E serial port to use in their applications.   They will be
expanding their system and have decided to use this to replace the 712 A/M
712B transition module they have now that is controlled with a VME 167.
(Actually we have to replace this with a 712M once we get a long enough
access to trouble shoot this.  It didnt work the first time we tried to
replace it.)  Currently most of the serial communciation is to HVsys
controllers, but they will be adding a few other devices.


We were able to get the support code for the 9660 carrier board to work and
have been looking at the Octal serial port issues.  We have had  limited
success in getting the manufacuters VxWorks test program running, but really
need EPICS driver and device support.

First question: while I know there isnt anything posted at the EPICS site
for this Octal device (there is for the SBS IP-Octal-232),  I was wondering
if anyone had looked at this device?

We have also been looking at other drivers to determine what will be
involved in writting device support and drivers, trying to see if we can
find any existing drivers etc. we might be able to modifiy.  Right now this
doesn't look promising..

Second question: since our expertise, and manpower is limited is there any
adivce or hints that  we should be following? We have had no previous
experience in writting device/driver support within our group that we can
draw on.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Bill Waggoner
bwaggoner@creighton.edu
Creighton Univ.
2500 California Plaza
Omaha NE 68178
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BNL
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