Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Steve Lewis <[email protected]> · Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:32:21 -0800

When the Front End of the Spallation Neutron Source was built, we had
the same challenge, but 60kV instead of 250kV. We solved it rather
nicely with units from GMW Associates called "Group3". In particular,
we found the "CNA" unit with 1 AO, 2 AI, 8 BI, 8 BO and some other
nice attributes (such as diagnostics, filtering, etc) worked very
well for a power supply. (They have other units to control motors,
etc, called "DI".)
Carl Lionberger at LBL <[email protected]> did the drv and dev
support for VxWorks. The connecting fiber was quite cheap. The
ground end controller can be VME (our choice) as well as ISA, PCI,
etc.
Contact either Brian Richter <[email protected]> or Ian Walker
<[email protected]> and visit
http://www.gmw.com/distributed_io/Group3Control/G3Control.html.

At 11:59 AM +0200 2007/11/14, Heinrich du Toit wrote:

Hi there
We have an Multi-sample ion source of negative ions by Ceium
sputtering for AMS application.

The thing sits at 250kV's

The Power Supplies also sits at 250kV's.

We need to control these power supplies to control the ioc source.
Now the 250kV makes for some problems.
One solution would be to put a PC up at 250kV.. but then you have no
local control (unless you put yourself at 250kV somehow) but only
remote (ssh) access. And there is the danger that a spark or
something could easily kill the PC :(
The other solution is to put the PC down at ground and then
communicate using some fiber-link.

fiber-links are expensive so we would like to only use 1 of them for
all the power-supply units.

So I was thinking maybe RS485 protocol.
Maybe somebody did work on this type of problem already and have
something that could help us?
thanks
-Heinrich

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System