Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Bill Brown) · Thu, 22 Jan 1998 10:15:53 -0800

> Is there anyone who can help with this.  We aren't using these devices
> here.
> Rozelle

I have no experience worth mentioning with support of GPIB on PCs, either
under dos/windoze or EPICS.  I hope that the following will be helpful
WRT EPICS on vme.

AFAIK, only 2 GPIB (IEEE-488) interfaces are supported by EPICS.

The first is the (in)famous NI-1014 from National Instruments, about which
John Winans had much to say after getting driver and device support
working.

The second is the Hewlett-Packard E2050A "LAN-HPIB Gateway" which has had
support written by Ben Franksen at BESSY.  I don't know if this has been
folded into the "official" release, or even as there are plans to do so.
(IMHO it probably should be, but it's not my call!)

I sort of "Alpha/Beta" tested it for Ben, and IMHO it's "the greatest thing
since sliced bread," as far as GPIB support goes.  We currently have one
unit in "production" (controlling the master-oscillator for the ALS) and
I'm about ready to deploy a couple more on a beam-line which is under
construction.  These are relatively inexpensive, at < $1K/unit.

Hmmm - I wonder what would be required to make this code run under EPICS/
VxWorks on an Intel platform.

The H.P. vme board (not to be confused with the gateway described above)
is not supported in any manner by EPICS (AFAIK) which is unfortunate as
it looks to be a much better piece of gear than the NI-1014.  I think it
came to market later, which is probably why the N.I. board became the
default for EPICS.

Carl Cork ([email protected]) wrote a vxworks-compatible driver for the HP.
At one point I had planned to fit it into EPICS, but it never got far
enough up the priority stack for me to ever really _do_ anything about
it.  Then the HP2050A came along and the need for an alternative to the
NI-1014 seemed to be filled.

There is a Hideos(sp?) driver for a IP-pack GPIB interface.  I've never
used it as we don't use Hideos.  I looked at converting it to a straight
EPICS driver, but since it's written in C++ which I don't speak and the
HP2050A came along, it didn't happen.  Perhaps someone else has done this
job.

IMHO, new projects really should have an alternative to the NI-1014.

Device support for the HP scope shouldn't be too big of a problem.  Take
a look at devNewSkeletonGpib.c in the EPICS source.  About "all you need
to do is" to edit command strings that the 'scope will understand into
the param strings.  While it may not seem obvious how to do that, after
you get the first one working it's fairly straight-forward.  Johns' note
in the documentation on the web should be a good starting point.

All of my babbling here seems pretty bland to me, but something tells
me I'd best include a disclaimer.

Disclaimer:  Any opinions are my own and have	    |  -bill
    nothing to do with the official policy or the   |   [email protected]
    management of L.B.N.L, who probably couldn't    |   Berkeley, CA
    care less about employees who play with trains. |   aka [email protected]

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System