Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Rhyder <[email protected]> · Mon, 21 Nov 2016 03:09:01 +0000

HI All

An update on epicsQt.

News of my retirement and the death of epicsQt is greatly exaggerated!

EpicsQt is still under active development and over the past year its use at the Australian Synchrotron has extended in scope beyond beamline support and is now used as the GUI system for the accelerator control system.

Since the release of 3.3.1 in July there have been around 100 updates to the code which have been published in around 25 updates the public trunk on sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/epicsqt/

Another release is imminent and we intend on moving to a git repository at this stage.

Regarding my own involvement, I resigned as an employee from the Australian Synchrotron on February but am still working here on a contract basis in a similar capacity. While I am still involved in the development of epicsQt my colleague Andrew Starritt has taken over the primary development role. Andrew has over a decade of GUI development on EPICS based systems and has been working on epicsQt for several years now and is now providing the majority of code contributions.

While as a contractor my future with the Australian Synchrotron is, by nature, uncertain epicsQt still has a permanent and active developer and we are still happy to take on board other facilities’ ideas and contributions for epicsQt. And as a bonus, I am now in a position to assist you directly!

Regards
Andrew Rhyder

[email protected]

[email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruce Hill
Sent: Thursday, 17 November 2016 11:45 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Status of EPICS and Qt

We're working on a python Qt based display manager called PyDM  that allows our operators and experimenters to blend analysis  python GUI's  using pylab, scipy, etc. w/ EPICS acquisition and control.
https://conference.sns.gov/event/11/session/1/contribution/45

Rather than implement a full new set of EPICS aware widgets, I'm looking into making the epicsqt widget set available to
these gui's using python wrappers.    I considered using
the caqtdm widget set for this, but it appears to require the caqtdm display program to be driving the widgets, so I think the epicsqt EPICS aware widgets will work better w/ python.

As we're also looking at how to convert our existing edm screens, we could use and customize the existing edm to epicsqt ui file conversion scripts to help create epicsqt equivalents for more static layout based control screens.

Regards,
- Bruce

On 11/16/2016 09:34 AM, Andrew Johnson wrote:
> Questions for readers of this list, please respond if you know 
> anything about the current state of projects connecting Qt with EPICS.
>
> Is the http://www.epicsqt.org/ website and the associated development 
> effort now dead? I notice that the Wiki that was there has been 
> removed (or it died and nobody has fixed it) so the only thing present 
> on that website now appears to be the front page.
>
> I know Andrew Rhyder is now retired and he hasn't committed any 
> changes to his epicsqt github repo since last June. Is anyone still 
> working on the core epicsqt code in a private repo? Are any EPICS 
> sites developing applications based on Andrew's code?
>
> Both Anton Mezger and Helge Brands are still actively working on 
> caQtDM, and hopefully Anton's retirement won't have a significant 
> affect on future development. Is there any relationship between this 
> code and the epicsqt stuff any more?
>
> Does it make sense to use the caQtDM code as the basis for other 
> applications? Has anyone written a related/similar replacement for 
> StripTool, Probe or ALH yet?
>
> What EPICS sites have developers working in this area?
>
> Are there any other major questions I've missed?
>
> - Andrew
>

--
Bruce Hill
Member Technical Staff
SLAC National Accelerator Lab
2575 Sand Hill Road M/S 10
Menlo Park, CA  94025

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System