Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hej Marco,

This is a tricky thing.
I have heard about those “weird values” at startup before,
and we had them on a PMAC once.
After a lot of digging, I found that there is a possible race condition.
And did changes to overcome them, mainly in motorRecord.cc

If my theory is right, it may help, if you put a
 epicsThreadSleep 4
just before iocInit, and then the driver has more time to talk to the
controller and read the motor position, before the record needs it.

It could even be the case, the the asynReport delays execution
similar to the epicsThreadSleep, so that the problem is worked around.

Or it could be a complete different problem.
Without having a hardware to play with, it is hard to tell,
and easy to speculate.

The “sometimes” in your report indicates that there is something
shaky, so lets hope that we can figure out, what it is.
BR
/Torsten
 



> On 30 Sep 2022, at 14:43, Marco A. Barra Montevechi Filho <marco.filho at lnls.br> wrote:
>
> Hy, Torsten! Thanks for the answer!
>
> Although I have time to try this, the beamline that uses these particular motors does not, at least not today. We have never observed this behavior in any motor before, so i believe it would be unproductive to test this elsewhere.
> I believe next week i might have some free beamline time to test this. Let me see if i understood what you meant:
>
> If the race condition messes with us and causes this weird behavior, then putting asynReport 10 <PORTNAME> will result in messages such as
> "MOTOR_POSITION, value is undefined" when i get wrong values (e.g.: multiplied by 10, in my case), and will not result in these messages when i get my values right.
>
> Is that it? If yes, i can make this test next week and report here.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marco
> From: Torsten Bögershausen <torsten.bogershausen at ess.eu>
> Sent: 30 September 2022 02:56
> To: Marco A. Barra Montevechi Filho <marco.filho at lnls.br>; tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
> Cc: Augusto Yoshio Horita <augusto.horita at lnls.br>
> Subject: Re: Suspicious behavior of Pmac 2-5-16 IOC. .RBV and .VAL showing wrong values.
> 
> Hej Marco,
>
> There is a possible race condition, when the IOC starts:
> The record tries to read the position of the motor
> from the driver, but the driver has not yet been able
> to fully talk to the controller.
>
> If I run
> asynReport 10 MCU1
>
> just before iocInit in st.cmd, I see things like this:
>
> Parameter 8 type=asynFloat64, name=MOTOR_POSITION, value is undefined
> Parameter 9 type=asynFloat64, name=MOTOR_ENCODER_POSITION, value is
> undefined
> (and may be have a look at
> MOTOR_REC_RESOLUTION as well)
>
> (You asynReport needs probably another name)
>
> Before we dig into a possible solution:
> Do you have time to try this ?
>
> BR
> /Torsten
>
>
>
>
> On 2022-09-29 19:43, Marco A. Barra Montevechi Filho via Tech-talk wrote:
> > Hello all. We were having problems with Pmac 2-5-16 here at LNLS. The
> > problem was solved by Augusto Horita (in copy), but the behavior was
> > weird and we though maybe someone here knows why it is like that or
> > maybe reporting it in tech-talk would be useful for other people.
> >
> > The IOC was compiled with EPICS base 3.15.6.
> >
> > The particular instance that we were having trouble with had a set of
> > axis in the PVs such as:
> >
> > BL:H:PB02:CS1:m1
> >
> > the axis was configured with
> >
> > pmacSetCoordStepsPerUnit("$(PPMAC_CS1_PORT)", 1, 1000)
> >
> > and its MRES was set to 10E-3.
> >
> > When initialized, the IOC sometimes showed the right values for .RBV and
> > .VAL fields, but sometimes showed values 10 times bigger than what
> > should be. Sometimes the *10 factor was only in .RBV, sometimes only in
> > .VAL and sometimes in both.
> >
> > Augusto suspected this was due to failure in pmacSetCoordStepsPerUnit
> > since the default scale factor is 10000 (ten times bigger than what we
> > were using). So we suspected that the function was failing for whatever
> > reason and defaulting the scale factor to 10000 while MRES remained in
> > 10E-3. Indeed, changing MRES to 10E-4 and
> >
> > pmacSetCoordStepsPerUnit("$(PPMAC_CS1_PORT)", 1, 1000)
> >   to
> > pmacSetCoordStepsPerUnit("$(PPMAC_CS1_PORT)", 1, 10000)
> >
> > Solved the problem.
> >
> > In the middle of the debug process, we struggled to find any error
> > message about the suspected failure in pmacSetCoordStepsPerUnit.
> > Is this absence of error message intentional? Is there a particular
> > debug method we should have used?
> > Has this been reported before?
> >
> > Thanks for the attention. Best regards,
> >
> > Marco
> >
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