Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Wed, 21 Aug 1996 18:45:11 +0100 (GMT)

On Wed, 21 Aug 96 09:47:52 PDT Bill Brown <[email protected]> wrote:

> Perhaps some discussion of creating a "standard model" for supporting IP cards
> under EPICS might be in order.  As the IP interface (including module
> identification) seems to fairly well specified, perhaps we could take advantage
> of that information in the system configuration and initialization process.
> 
> Any ideas?  Is this worth spending some time on during the next epics meeting?

Hideos uses one "standard model" for supporting IP cards providing you 
are using C++ and an MVME162; I have already developed another which works 
in straight C and also supports other IP carriers.  You may already have 
my code, as it's used by the CANbus driver which is in some of the recent 
distributions - have a look for base/src/drv/ansi/drvIpac.c.  
Documentation is available under http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~anj/epics/

My model involves having a driver for each type of carrier board, the 
standard drvIpac.c driver then uses these to control all of the carrier 
boards installed, and provides services to any module drivers which talk 
to the individual IP modules.

I don't attempt to do auto-configuration; you have to put something into 
the startup script to introduce each carrier board (on the 162 this would 
be simple, but it gets *much* harder with external IP carrier boards). My 
canBus driver also requires you to explicitly introduce each IP module as 
well -- it should be possible to create an IP module driver which scanned 
all of the IP slots to find instances of the modules it supports, but if 
there is any other configuration needed for these modules I think it's 
better to be explicit about their whereabouts.

By the way, has anyone out there tried the drvIpMv162 carrier driver yet?  
Does it work?

- Andrew

  O o ._    Andrew Johnson, Royal Greenwich Observatory
     __\\_	Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0EZ
  __|ooooo|__	Tel +44 (0)1223 374823  Fax 374700
~~\_________/~~	WWW http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~anj/

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System