Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hi All,

Thank you for all the suggestions.

Writing to the PROC field after iocInit or setting PINI to 1 both fix the issue. As does setting motorStatusCommsError_ to 0 first then to 1. So I will do one of these.

Torsten, the initial state I see isn't actually a conventional UDF state. The UDF field is 0 and there are no alarms on the PV. The only way of telling that it's in this state is that the timestamp is invalid. If it was a normal UDF state I would be happy just leaving it as the alarms will propagate through to the user. In the timestamp invalid state it's not obvious that there is an error. Are you instead seeing a normal UDF state? 

Thanks,
Dominic

-----Original Message-----
From: Torsten Bögershausen <[email protected]> 
Sent: 16 August 2019 07:45
To: Oram, Dominic (STFC,RAL,ISIS) <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: Undefined Timestamp on Motor Record



On 15/08/19 19:16, Dominic Oram - UKRI STFC via Tech-talk wrote:

Hello,

I'm in the process of writing a model 3 motor driver using version 6-11 of the motor record.

I have found some unexpected behaviour on initialisation if the driver has no device connected.

It appears the motor stays in the following state unless a parameter is updated at some point after initialisation (I'm not sure when):

caget -a MOTOR
MOTOR        <undefined> 0

If I have no device connected I set motorStatusCommsError_ to 1 on the first call to poll(). However, because all subsequent calls to poll() do not change any parameters I stay in the above state. I would instead expect to see something like:

caget -a MOTOR
MOTOR        2019-08-15 15:57:41.931650 0 COMM INVALID

as in the undefined timestamp situation it's not obvious to users that there is a comm error.

Setting motorStatusCommsError_ to 1 at some time after initialisation does give me the expected state.

Is this actually expected behaviour?

May be, may be not.
My understanding is, that all EPICS records stay in "undefined" state (UDF) until the device support is able to talk to the device.
In that sense the "undefined" state is OK.
(And this is what we do with motors here at ESS,
  never connected -> undefined.)

 > Do other people see something similar?
Yes, fully reproducible here.
I think that easiest solution is to do a workaround like this:

   status = initialPollInternal();
   if (status != asynSuccess) {
     setIntegerParam(pC_->motorStatusCommsError_, 0);
     setIntegerParam(pC_->motorStatusCommsError_, 1);
   }

Thanks,

Dominic Oram
Senior Software Engineer
Experimental Controls
ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

-- 
Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.