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Subject: RE: Looking for feedback on what epics users require
From: Ahed Al adwan <[email protected]>
To: "Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc." <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:10:21 +0200
Hi Pawel,

Good initiative.

You can have a look at the s7plc driver:

http://epics.web.psi.ch/software/s7plc/

>From a single softioc you can have a TCP connection to many PLCs (power supplies in your case), based on the number of power supplies and the mode of operation- traffic - one might need a dedicated subnet to have the softioc and all the other power supplies connected to, or even define the maximum number of power supplies connected to a softioc. I assume here that the high speed functionality is at the power supply side in your design.

For the Client side, if the customer uses EPICS, I suggest you provide an medm file as an example, it will require modification or even elimination based on the EPICS site, but still, it communicates your GUI view of the system, you have to be aware here of the limitation medm has compared to Labview or - for some - Labview compared to medm :)

Best regards,
Ahed


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ralph Lange
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 11:03 AM
To: Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc.
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Looking for feedback on what epics users require

Hello Pawel,

To connect to your power supplies through UDP on standard ethernet, you
do not need to run the IOC on VxWorks. So-called "soft IOCs" run as a
multi-threaded process on any "host side" OS, such as Linux (preferred)
or Windows. If the only device connection of the IOC is through
IP/ethernet, this solution is probably more flexible and efficient (many
soft IOCs can run on a single machine), and a lot less expensive
(inexpensive hardware, free OS). You could go as far as only supplying
the software needed to create and run the power supply IOC on a machine
the customer would provide.

If your systems are to be integrated into an existing EPICS based
structure, most installations will have their own solution for display
(panel) managers, alarm handlers, achivers etc., based on the variety of
tools that are part of the EPICS toolkit. Creating some user interfaces
that you ship with your IOCs is a good thing to do, but forcing your
customers to use stuff that you supply would probably rather cause
resistance, and (in the best case) your beautiful panels would just be
not used.

Be aware that the Channel Access network protocol that people will use
to integrate your IOCs is completely relying on channel names to
describe hierarchies and - to some degree - properties. Any existing
EPICS system will have a strict naming convention for channels, and any
"foreign" IOCs with channels that don't follow that customer convention
will cause a lot of grief and trouble when being integrated. You should
try to create a solution that allows channel names to be adapted to
customer naming schemes. This is not easy.
(IE in our case your "powersys:voltage" name would of course be
completely unacceptable and be replaced by something like
"Q3PD5R:rdVolt" - first part: device name, second part: channel name,
both following strict conventions.)

Thanks for asking, (I mean it - please continue to ask!)
Ralph


On 10.03.2009 15:45 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.



References:
Looking for feedback on what epics users require Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc.
Re: Looking for feedback on what epics users require Ralph Lange

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