Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Liyu, Andrei" <[email protected]> · Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:53:50 -0500

	Dear Mr. Bernhard Kuner

"To tie an OPC-server to an EPICS-IOC would mean to give other non EPICS
control systems (as Labview and others that have an OPC interface,
mentioned by Mr Liyu) the chance to access EPICS process variables.
Since we use EPICS as control system up to now we had no need for that,
so nothing happend with us in this way."

	I tried to write another.
	Before 1999 NI had special OPC client and server toolkit. Then
they included OPC toolkit into LabVIEW.
	I believe OPC server and EPICS are compatible products as Front
End Computers. So if Epics would have possibility to be included in
another product (start, access to PV, stop) then it will be the same as
"OPC in LabVIEW" now.
	Do we need that? That is product openness question.
	SNS project uses PCs with LabVIEW and Epics. LabVIEW works with
PC cards and Epics sends/gets data to/from clients. To do connection
between Epics and LabVIEW we use Shared Memory library. But way of
"LabVIEW with OPC" looks more naitive :)
	But maybe I am mistaken ...

	Have a good day, Andrei Liyu

-----Original Message-----
From: Bernhard Kuner [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 9:54 AM
To: Xu HuiJuan; [email protected]
Subject: Re: OPC WITH EPICS

Dear Ms. Xu,

There is a free OPC Server Toolkit available, maybe it could help You to
explore the secrets of OPC server programming :-)

http://www.ipi.ac.ru/lab43/lopc-en.html

What we have done here (the Germans mentioned by Mr Liyu) is the other
way, to tie an OPC-client to an EPICS-IOC to get process variables from
the hardware (PLCs) via their OPC-server into our EPICS control system.

For get into the OPC-server stuff, the lightOPC should be a good point
to start, but I have no experience with that. If You ever have an
running OPC-Server, it should not be a problem to use our EPICS device
support for the OPC-client and replace the IO-functions for the
OPC-client with Your new ones that point to Your OPC server.

Good luck

Bernhard Kuner

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System