Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Claude Saunders <[email protected]> · Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:56:50 -0500

The deployment scenario for these power supplies will likely factor into

any given customer's requirements. If there are only a few supplies

being used, then as Tim Mooney pointed out, the simplest integration

technique is to provide a turn-key IOC. But as Ernest pointed out, there

will inevitably be many custom tweaks desired for the turn-key IOC

config, so much of the configuration (and possibly code) needs to be

exposed.

If there will be hundreds of power supplies being used, then things get

a bit more complicated. If each supply has an IOC, then each controlling

Channel Access client will have to make hundreds of TCP connections.

This can be managed through an EPICS PV Gateway, but the feasibility

depends on a customers network layout, and whether or not they want to

introduce PV Gateways into their system.

Probably the most flexible approach is to provide EPICS device support

and a template of EPICS records that can control your supply. In the

case of hundreds of power supplies, for example, the customer could put

your UDP traffic on a private subnet, and have just a couple of IOCs

running all of the supplies. Then Channel Access clients could access

all the supplies with just a couple TCP connections (on a separate

subnet). This approach has the added advantage of not having to package

up an entire IOC (and reduce your exposure to possible bugs that arise

in IOC Core).

   just some thoughts - there is lots to evaluate
         Claude

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