Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc." <[email protected]> · Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:27:28 -0600

I want to thank everyone for the feedback provided so far, it has been
extremely helpful. I will do my best to answer the questions which I have
knowledge on, the questions I can't answer at this time I will be setting up
a meeting with our engineering team and some of our partners to try and get
answers to those questions hopefully some time next week.

Ernest, it is our intention to make the application open source. However, I
do not know at this time what the application will be written in. I can not
answer the timing question at this time but I do know we have a fairly large
number of our power supplies out at LCLS right now so I don't think this
would be an issue, I will check on this. Dealing with interlocks also
shouldn't be a problem.

Sincerely,
Pawel Kowalski
BiRa Systems Inc.
505-881-8887
http://www.bira.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Ernest L. Williams Jr. [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 8:58 AM
To: Pawel Kowalski - BiRa Systems Inc.
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Looking for feedback on what epics users require

Hi,

Here at SLAC we would most likely use EDM as our client interface.
In this case, we simply require access to the PVs that your IOC would
provide.

We also, require the ability to modify anything in the source code of your
EPICS IOC for customization.

Will your solution be fully open source such as your vxWorks driver code?

Thanks,
Ernest
SLAC Control Systems

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