Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Marty Kraimer <[email protected]> · Wed, 21 Mar 2001 08:33:34 -0600

"Rod B. Nussbaumer" wrote:

> I have been working on device support for the NI GPIB-Enet.  It will
> be based substantially on the C library (such as it is) that we purchased
> from NI.  Optimistically, it will be ready to deploy when our ISAC
> accelerator starts up agian in about a month.  Right now, it is
> at a very rudimentary stage of completion.  It will not include support
> for such things as SRQ servicing, in the short term.  There is some
> question about licensing/distribution, due to the use of the NI code.
> 
> We have only been using the 10 Mbps device, and it is unknown whether
> the code will apply to their newer 100 Mbps units.
> 
> Up until now, I have been using the devices from Labview on Solaris,
> and relaying information to EPICS using Labview CIN's, calling the
> Ezca library functions.  This has not been a very satisfactory means
> of deploying the GPIB-Enet, and I am anxious to get the EPICS support
> completed.  I have some serious questions about the robustness of
> these devices, and we have had some discussions here about other
> means of implementing GPIB instrument support; in particular, using
> PCI GPIB controllers in desktop PC's, likely running Linux, and
> some form of channel access.

When 3.14.0alpha2 is released, it will be possible use a version of Benjamin
Franksen's GPIB support with it.

It provides the following features:

1) It runs under iocCore. Starting with 3.14 iocCore is supported on vxWorks,
RTEMS, solaris, Linux, and windows.
2) Supports the devCommonGpib facility. This is a very flexable way to support
most features of most gpib devides.
3) It supports the Agilent E2050A GPIB/LAN adapter on vxWorks, RTEMS, solaris,
and Linux. If someone is interested they can probably also support it on winNT.
4) It supports the NI1014 but only on vxWorks.
5) It is possible to write support for other gpib interfaces by implementing the
interface described in Benjamin's documentation. This is a good way to support
PCI GPIB interfaces on Linux PCs.

Please note that this will be new version of Benjamin's code that has been
converted to use the new Operating System Independent features of 3.14. Eric
Norman did most of the conversion. The following on-line document is still
mostly valid but some of the new features are not explained.

http://www-csr.bessy.de/control/SoftDist/gpib/

Marty Kraimer

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System