Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (William Lupton) · Tue, 19 Sep 95 07:55:02 HST

Ian,

> is anybody using a VME RS232 interface (not the 4 ports at the back)?  I've
> seen the Macrolink MVC mentioned.

We use the Force SIO-2 board for both Keck I and Keck II. This has six serial
interfaces, most or all (not sure) of which are configurable as RS-422. This
is a relatively old board and, for example, requires a CPU interrupt for each
incoming character.

We have a VxWorks driver for this board and are using software written for us
by Jeff Hill to interface it to EPICS. This software consists of:

  (a) a low-level driver layer which uses STANDARD I/O and therefore will
      work with any serial board which has a VxWorks driver and supports
      a fairly standard set of ioctls. This level supports creation of
      receive and transmit tasks to handle incoming and outgoing communication.

  (b) EPICS device support layered on top of (a). We currently have three
      such modules, one for our barcode absolute encoding system, one for
      our Allen-Bradley PLC system, and one for a Compumotor SX stepper-motor
      controller.

Jeff Hill can provide more information on the above. It can be made available
via anonymous FTP from our (i.e. Keck's) FTP site and can be supplied as part
of standard EPICS if there is interest in that. I would suggest that you give
serious consideration to gojng via the standard VxWorks driver interface.

  William

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System