Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andreas Weidner <[email protected]> · Thu, 3 May 2001 19:31:08 +0200 (MET DST)

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

browsing through your EPICS internet pages, I got the idea that your 
software is just what we need to do serious data acquisition with many 
channels (which we need for our next project).

There is a lot of documentation available concerning how to do the 
programming and such, but what I sorely missed (perhaps I just overlooked 
it) was some information about HOW to set up the whole SYSTEM.

I understand that, for a minimal system, I need
 - a VME crate running vxWorks (which I also do not know),
 - a VME card that does the 'real' AD conversion,
 - the Tornado software from WindRiver Systems (what does it do?)
 - and your EPICS software running on a workstation.

But, provided both EPICS and Tornado are properly installed, what do I 
have to do now?

I understand that
 - I have to set up a database to tell EPICS the type, name,
   etc. of the 'real' hardware devices that I am using (inside
   the VME cards)
 - and that I can somehow build a GUI with a program called MEDM. 

But now I am stuck. HOW do I put all these separate things together? How 
do I tell the VME crate what to do? How does the VME crate know about the 
VME card I bought? How does the information in the database get to both 
VME crate and EPICS? How does the GUI know about all this? What is this 
Tornado necessary for? Somewhere, I need to program in C, but where?

I would be very interested to get some information about a complete 
design cycle with EPICS for a VERY primitive task, e.g. just reading some 
voltage and displaying it on screen. Imagine I have the hardware in my 
hands, I have the software installed, and now I want to do the 'real' 
thing and put it all together. Could you tell me HOW to do that? Many 
thanks in advance.

With best regards,
Andreas Weidner

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System