Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"David Dudley" <[email protected]> · Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:08:01 -0500

I have a future requirement for replacing/ upgrading our SCADA system.

The current system we are using, which is based on National Instruments Lookout has proven in the past three years to be basically useless, temperamental, unreliable, and relatively impossible to expand to include all of the capabilities we are looking for.

I've been looking around for a while, and ran across EPICS.  What I read is really impressive.  This sounds like a system I could learn to even "enjoy" working with.

Now for a question or two.  In order to expand our system sufficiently, it would be extremely helpful to port the EPICS system to NetBSD, which we can run on the PLC systems we have installed in the field.

These systems have  a 256MB Compact Flash Memory card for program storage, and 128MB of memory to operate with.  Putting Linux on them is a waste, because even if I can find the proper support for all the specialized hardware, by the time I get it all installed, I have very little Flash left for storage, and forget it if you want to run a reasonably large program.  Also, the Linux I have managed to squeeze into this system didn't exactly like not having a swap disk.

NetBSD is much faster on this hardware, and uses only a small portion of the memory space available.

NetBSD is fairly close in concept to Solaris, I believe (its a port of BSD4.4).

Is there anything available that provides any documentation on how to port EPICS to a new architecture?

David Dudley
Functional Analyst
O. N. Stevens Water Treatment Plant
City of Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi, TX

<[email protected]>

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System