Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Emmanuel Mayssat <[email protected]> · Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:03:25 -0700

Pawel,

Excellent idea to provide an IOC running on your device.
I already work with similar devices and am actually actively looking at
EPICS plug and play devices. That's how I call them. 
The reason: we don't have to do develop anything ourselves!
(And as far as you are concerned, you can increase your margin!)

The way such device is usually managed is through a FTP (not NFS)
transfer of a 'msi' substitution file
(http://epics.aps.anl.gov/epics/extensions/msi/). The end user do not
have access to (and therefore cannot change) the msi template.

The possible issue with of a msi framework is that the end user may or
may not be able to change all the field of your records (the NAME field
of the PV can be changed whereas the low operating range (LOPR) may
not). Additionally, the record types may also not be the one desired
ones (Waveform prefered over a simple Analog input). 

The way I solve those 2 issues is with a soft IOC running on the network
(another computer) that does some aliasing, overwrite record fields, and
convert types (Historical waveform/compress of a AI).

On my site, LabView user are advanced operators/physicists and not
control system programmer. You just need to provide documented C/C++
libraries that allows LabView (or any other client software) to connect
to your device over the network. A working LabView GUI would help.

BTW, half of our power supplies are from you already.
The other half is for you to take ;-)

PS: If you need more detail give me a call!
PSS: I may be your first customer of your new device!

--
Emmanuel
650/793-0626

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 08:45 -0600, 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.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System