Re: Kohzu SC-400 GPIB driver support

[Ron Sluiter <sluiter@aps.anl.gov>]

Hello Konstantin,

The VME_IO that appears in devKOhzuMotor.dbd on the line;
device(motor,VME_IO, devSC800, "SC-800")
only defines the format of the OUT field that the device support
expects. In this case, the motor record device support expects
the OUT field to be in the VME_IO format, which is defined in
the EPICS Application Developer’s Guide as;

> • VME_IO
> #Ccard Ssignal @parm
> where:
> card - the card number of associated hardware module.
> signal - signal on card
> parm - An arbitrary character string of up to 31 characters.
> This field is optional and is device specific.

VME_IO has nothing directly to do with the VMEbus; it is just
a convenient format for specifying VMEbus hardware.

The error message "card does not exist" is probably a result of
the driver subroutine motor_init() not being able to establish
communication with the device at boot-up.

In situations like this (i.e., motor controller communication problems)
I strongly recommend that you use the asyn record to verify the
communication link to the motor controller. Motor record drivers
try to establish communication at boot-up time and give up if it
fails. The asyn record allows you to attempt controller
communication outside boot-up.

Hope this helps,
Ron

Konstantin Ignatyev wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to use EPICS to run Kohzu SC-400 controller with soft IOC 
> on a Linux PC with GPIB card. At this stage I built EPICS and SynApps 
> with Linux GPIB package and can successfully talk to the controller 
> via asynRecord. Ideally I'd like to make it work with Ron Sluiter's 
> Kohzu SC-800 (same set of commands as SC-400) driver support, however 
> I keep getting the following error:
>
> Illegal field value PV: kohzu:m1 motor_init_record_com(): card does 
> not exist!
>
> My guess is that EPICS is looking for a VME card since VME_IO is 
> listed as address type in devKOhzuMotor.dbd file and can't find it for 
> obvious reason. I'm just starting building EPICS applications, so 
> hopefully there's an obvious solution that I can't see at the moment. 
> Below is my IOC startup file:
>
>
> # Linux startup script
> < envPaths
> # save_restore.cmd needs the full path to the startup directory, which
> # envPaths currently does not provide
> epicsEnvSet(STARTUP,$(TOP)/iocBoot/$(IOC))
> # Increase size of buffer for error logging from default 1256
> errlogInit(20000)
> # Specify largest array CA will transport
> # Note for N sscanRecord data points, need (N+1)*8 bytes, else MEDM
> # plot doesn't display
> epicsEnvSet EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES 64008
> ################################################################################ 
>
> # Tell EPICS all about the record types, device-support modules, drivers,
> # etc. in the software we just loaded (kohzu.munch)
> dbLoadDatabase("../../dbd/iockohzuLinux.dbd")
> iockohzuLinux_registerRecordDeviceDriver(pdbbase)
>
> GpibBoardDriverConfig("L0",1,0,3,0)
>
> dbLoadTemplate("motor.substitutions")
>
> # Kohzu SC-800 motor controller setup parameters:
> # (1) maximum number of controllers in system
> # (2) motor task polling rate (min=1Hz,max=60Hz)
> SC800Setup(1, 5)
> # Kohzu SC-800 motor controller configuration parameters:
> # (1) controller# being configured
> # (2) ASYN port name
> # (3) address (GPIB only)
> SC800Config(0, "L0", 1)
> var drvSC800debug 4
> ############################################################################### 
>
> iocInit