Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:09:40 -0500

Hi Bill,

One approach I have taken with this is to have a soft IOC with a database that exports values to EPICS.  An SNL program in this soft IOC monitors those PVs, and makes the calls to the vendor supplied DLLs or COM/Active X libraries.  You don't need to use sub records, you can use records like ai, ao, stringin, etc in that database.

Another approach I've used is to write EPICS drivers/device support that runs on the Windows system for those PVs and directly calls the vendor libraries.  If you use the standard asyn device support then writing an asyn driver is pretty straightforward in many cases.

Mark

________________________________

From: Bill Nolan [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Fri 9/15/2006 2:56 PM
To: Tech-Talk
Subject: Active-X and Epics

Hi all,
    It looks like I am going to have to connect a number of devices in
to my system that only offer active-X hooks.
    I have two device types with widows control software that offer
Active-X interfaces, the remainder of my controls are Epics on Linux hosts.
Is the Active_X interface form the CA_interfaces page still the best way
to approach getting the two systems to talk ?
Would making a soft IOC and linking the vendor supplied Active X/dll's
in to sub() records be a better way to go ?

Thanks
--Bill

--
Bill Nolan
Washington University Medical School
Department of Biochemistry
4566 Scott Ave.
Mail Stop 8231
St. Louis, Mo 63110
1.314.362.4445 Fax 1.314.362.7183

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System