Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System
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Hello Pawel,
To connect to your power supplies through UDP on standard ethernet, you
do not need to run the IOC on VxWorks. So-called "soft IOCs" run as a
multi-threaded process on any "host side" OS, such as Linux (preferred)
or Windows. If the only device connection of the IOC is through
IP/ethernet, this solution is probably more flexible and efficient (many
soft IOCs can run on a single machine), and a lot less expensive
(inexpensive hardware, free OS). You could go as far as only supplying
the software needed to create and run the power supply IOC on a machine
the customer would provide.
If your systems are to be integrated into an existing EPICS based
structure, most installations will have their own solution for display
(panel) managers, alarm handlers, achivers etc., based on the variety of
tools that are part of the EPICS toolkit. Creating some user interfaces
that you ship with your IOCs is a good thing to do, but forcing your
customers to use stuff that you supply would probably rather cause
resistance, and (in the best case) your beautiful panels would just be
not used.
Be aware that the Channel Access network protocol that people will use
to integrate your IOCs is completely relying on channel names to
describe hierarchies and - to some degree - properties. Any existing
EPICS system will have a strict naming convention for channels, and any
"foreign" IOCs with channels that don't follow that customer convention
will cause a lot of grief and trouble when being integrated. You should
try to create a solution that allows channel names to be adapted to
customer naming schemes. This is not easy.
(IE in our case your "powersys:voltage" name would of course be
completely unacceptable and be replaced by something like
"Q3PD5R:rdVolt" - first part: device name, second part: channel name,
both following strict conventions.)
Thanks for asking, (I mean it - please continue to ask!)
Ralph
On 10.03.2009 15:45 Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc. wrote:
Hello,
My company is researching providing an epics IOC with some of our
power supplies. I would like to get some feedback from the epics
community on what exactly would be required. First let me start off by
saying that epics is still a new area for me so hopefully these
questions aren't dumb, we are still in the early research stages on this.
What we would like to do is provide a system with each device that
will host an EPICS IOC. This will be a vxWorks based system running
epics base 3.14. This system will communicate with our device using
ethernet and convert standard UDP commands that our devices work on to
process variables. So for example our clients would now have a process
variable they could use to monitor or set the voltage of a power
supply (IE: powersys:voltage).
For the client side we would like to develop a LabVIEW interface, we
would most likely not be developing a custom C/C++ application for the
client.
Would this be adequate for most epics users or would more be required
to integrate this into an existing epics network? Would people use the
LabVIEW client we develop or do most labs use their own custom
software to control/monitor epics enabled equipment? Any feedback from
the community would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
- Replies:
- RE: Looking for feedback on what epics users require Ahed Al adwan
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- Looking for feedback on what epics users require Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc.
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ANJ, 31 Jan 2014 |
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