Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

See presentations at most recent EPICS meeting, for example "CS-Studio and Phoebus Update"

https://indico.lightsource.ca/event/2/contributions/49/

https://indico.lightsource.ca/event/2/contributions/49/attachments/30/104/CS-Studio%20and%20Phoebus.pdf

Phoebus is the more recent version of CS-Studio, much more development activity, but in the presentation you see a list of some of the sites who still operate with the Eclipse-based code, and they also still work on bug fixes and minor enhancements.

The ORNL site, https://controlssoftware.sns.ornl.gov/css_phoebus/, provides two nightly builds, one from the common phoebus repo, another that adds our site-specific settings and additions. https://github.com/ControlSystemStudio/phoebus/tree/master/phoebus-product describes how to start a site-specific product, which usually begins with just a settings.ini file for your EPICS CA address list.

While it's hard to argue about taste, the prettiest screenshots are without question on https://controlssoftware.sns.ornl.gov.

As for best looking, if you check wikipedia for Phoebus, you'll find it's just another name for Apollo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo, who has been considered good looking for millennia.

As to what you should use, that decision is ultimately for you to make. EDM, the older Eclipse-based CS-Studio, the newer Phoebus-based CS-Studio, MEDM, PyQtDM, .. are all free and open source, you're welcome to use them, but nobody can make any guarantees. Several of these offer ways for a limited 'import' of displays created with one of the other tools, like https://control-system-studio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/app/display/convert-medm/doc/index.html . Of course you'll always find some property of some widget in some display that won't convert exactly the way you had in mind, so picking the display tool for your site is a big decision.

For the display builder which started as 'BOY' in Eclipse, then Display Builder in Eclipse, now in Phoebus, and also to some extend available as a web runtime, https://github.com/ControlSystemStudio/phoebus/wiki/Display-Builder-Compatibility spells out some of details for longer term compatibility. Or you pick tool X now and decide to just go with that for the next 15 years, running on an isolated subnet, not worrying about OS updates etc.

-Kay

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of Leblanc, Gregory via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Sent: Saturday, October 9, 2021 11:25 AM
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Control System Studio vs Phoebus