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Subject: Re: Looking for feedback on what epics users require
From: Tim Mooney <[email protected]>
To: "Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc." <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:26:50 -0500
Pawell,

First of all, questions from vendors, about what customers would
like, are automatically not dumb.  What they are is rare.

If the devices, which you plan to provide with support, respond to
standard UDP commands, then maybe an IOC is not the most valuable
thing you could provide, because each write/read transaction would
require at least four hops on the network.  I think some of your
customers would prefer to have device support they can call from
their own IOC.  This probably only matters for high-traffic devices,
or devices likely to be used in feedback loops.

(I don't intend this to discourage you from providing an IOC, but
rather to encourage you to make the device-support code available.
Providing an IOC will dramatically simplify the integration job
in most cases.)

Client-side EPICS support seems to me generally much less valuable
than server-side EPICS support, because it has a smaller (more
fragmented) audience, and because clients are harder to orchestrate
than is server side support.  (If you provide a client that ramps
the device, for example, I probably can't call that client from my
client, or from my IOC, to get ramping done.  I'll probably have to
reverse engineer the client-side algorithm, and implement it in my
IOC.  If you provide EPICS server-side code that does the same job,
I can call it from anywhere.)

Tim Mooney

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.

--
Tim Mooney ([email protected]) (630)252-5417
Beamline Controls & Data Acquisition Group
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab.

Replies:
RE: Looking for feedback on what epics users require Dalesio, Leo
RE: Looking for feedback on what epics users require Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc.
References:
Looking for feedback on what epics users require Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc.

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