Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:19:33 -0400

On 10/7/08 1:00 PM, David Dudley wrote:
> Unfortunately, all my sites are not connected together over the network,
> some are handled using 1200 baud radios.
> 
> This is one of our remote facilities, where we handle Hydrofluoric acid
> (probably misspelled that one), Gaseous and Liquid Chlorine, and Liquid
> Ammonium Sulfate.  The alarm is to notify residents in the area in case
> of a chemical mishap or leak.  I'm lucky to have a PLC and a IOC
> available at this site, and I don't think there's enough space on the
> IOC's ram disk for me to run the alarm handler as well.
> 
> The site's pretty much dictated to me, and I'm using the IOC to
> communicate with all the gas detectors, make decisions about what's
> dangerous, and set off alarms.

Hi, David.

Just a heads-up: my understanding is that EPICS has not been designed to
be used in a role that provides human safety.  See this tech-talk post
from Andrew:

  http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/tech-talk/2008/msg00797.php

If you're using EPICS to provide some extra software alarms or something
in addition to existing human safety alarms, that's one thing.  But if
you're actually using EPICS to determine whether an alarm horn or strobe
should go off when some environment condition could be dangerous for a
human to warn them of a danger, I don't think EPICS was designed for that.

But this is just my understanding; I could be wrong.

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System