Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Baily, Scott A via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Wed, 11 Nov 2020 21:29:21 +0000

lvPortDriver https://github.com/lanl/lvPortDriver is probably the best way to do what you want. It does not work with Phar Lap (because EPICS doesn't build for Phar Lap), but I have tested with cRIOs running both LinuxRT (x86_64 and ARM) and VxWorks as well as on Windows systems.  It's an asynPortDriver class so it works just like standard EPICS device support (supports alarms and records set to I/O interrupt process on change and LabVIEW will get a user event when any parameter is written from EPICS).  All the parameters are declared using LabVIEW, so your EPICS programmers take care of the IOC and database  just like any other IOC, and your LabVIEW programmers can define the parameters and types without having to write any C or C++ code.  The IOC gets started by the LabVIEW code, so they both run on the realtime operating system.  This is a standard fully-featured EPICS IOC (not channel access portable server like the NI solution).  I currently don't have wrapper VI for setting the timestamp via LabVIEW (to support TSE=-2), but that should be easy to add.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> On Behalf Of Mostafa, Jalal (IPE) via Tech-talk
Sent: Monday, November 2, 2020 6:44 AM
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov
Subject: [EXTERNAL] LabView-EPICS Integration using SoftIoc

Hi all!

We have many systems from NI that we would like to integrate with EPICS for the KATRIN experiment (katrin.kit.edu) The old control system was written in LabView but we would like to replace it with EPICS without rewriting the code again. Therefore, we are looking for a nice LabView-EPICS integration.

We have seen two options for LabView:
- CALAB which does not work with realtime devices
- Official NI EPICS module. It is good but I can list several problems:
huge loss of EPICS features (it is only an implementation of CA plus alarming, the other metadata and configuration fields are not available)
- not very developer-friendly (adding/removing PVs relies on shared variables so it is time consuming)

Another two solutions we thought of:
1. Using AsynDriver and communicate with the realtime device using a TCP protocol 2. Running an EPICS server on the realtime device using NI EPICS module then shadowing it with a SoftIoc using CA links.
(a softIoc server running with input and output records to read and write to the original LabView EPICS server)

I have several concerns here:
- Am I missing any other way to integrate LabView with EPICS? I would like to hear from your experiences.

- Although solution (1) is time consuming, I am in favor of it but let's check if we can do it more easily with solution (2). Anyway, can the experts comment on its feasibility?

- Solution (2): What do you think about performance? Alarms? I/O Intr are not available on a softIoc, so the developer has to use periodic SCAN. How can I add custom SCAN periods?

Thanks for your help.

Best,

Jalal

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System