Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Paul Sichta <[email protected]> · Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:15:19 -0400

Pawel,

Would the power supply/IOC process variables be only scalar values, or

will there be waveforms as well. How fast can the waveforms/scalars be

updated/monitored/served. Regarding the configuration of the records

served, how can the user customize the names and other attributes, such

as Access Security (ASG) and units?

Regarding the client,

the Channel Access protocol is the interface for any client. That means

you should provide a specification of the served record names and their

characteristics, at least one good enough so that users can write their

own clients. If you provide a LabVIEW-based client, that is readily

useable but will it be an executable? Otherwise the user needs to

purchase LabVIEW. Also, NI supports the Channel Access protocol in

their DSC (data supervisory and control) LabVIEW add-on. But, that's

also expensive.

-ps

Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc. wrote:

Hello,

My company is researching providing an epics IOC with some of our power

supplies. I would like to get some feedback from the epics community on what
exactly would be required. First let me start off by saying that epics is
still a new area for me so hopefully these questions aren't dumb, we are
still in the early research stages on this.

What we would like to do is provide a system with each device that will host

an EPICS IOC. This will be a vxWorks based system running epics base 3.14.
This system will communicate with our device using ethernet and convert
standard UDP commands that our devices work on to process variables. So for
example our clients would now have a process variable they could use to

monitor or set the voltage of a power supply (IE: powersys:voltage).

For the client side we would like to develop a LabVIEW interface, we would

most likely not be developing a custom C/C++ application for the client.

Would this be adequate for most epics users or would more be required to

integrate this into an existing epics network? Would people use the LabVIEW
client we develop or do most labs use their own custom software to
control/monitor epics enabled equipment? Any feedback from the community
would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System