Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Konstantin Ignatyev <[email protected]> · Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:11:59 +0100

Hi Ron,

thanks for the information. I used asynRecord previously and was able to

talk to the Kohzu controller, move stages etc., so I guess the problem

is with the driver not being able to communicate with the controller at

boot-up. Good thing to know is that it potentially should work in my

current hardware configuration, so I'll try to look at what's going on

during driver initialisation to see if I can spot the problem.

Konstantin

Ron Sluiter wrote:

Hello Konstantin,

The VME_IO that appears in devKOhzuMotor.dbd on the line;
device(motor,VME_IO, devSC800, "SC-800")
only defines the format of the OUT field that the device support
expects. In this case, the motor record device support expects
the OUT field to be in the VME_IO format, which is defined in
the EPICS Application Developer’s Guide as;

• VME_IO
#Ccard Ssignal @parm
where:
card - the card number of associated hardware module.
signal - signal on card
parm - An arbitrary character string of up to 31 characters.
This field is optional and is device specific.

VME_IO has nothing directly to do with the VMEbus; it is just
a convenient format for specifying VMEbus hardware.

The error message "card does not exist" is probably a result of
the driver subroutine motor_init() not being able to establish
communication with the device at boot-up.

In situations like this (i.e., motor controller communication problems)
I strongly recommend that you use the asyn record to verify the
communication link to the motor controller. Motor record drivers
try to establish communication at boot-up time and give up if it
fails. The asyn record allows you to attempt controller
communication outside boot-up.

Hope this helps,
Ron

Konstantin Ignatyev wrote:

Hello,

I'm trying to use EPICS to run Kohzu SC-400 controller with soft IOC

on a Linux PC with GPIB card. At this stage I built EPICS and SynApps

with Linux GPIB package and can successfully talk to the controller

via asynRecord. Ideally I'd like to make it work with Ron Sluiter's

Kohzu SC-800 (same set of commands as SC-400) driver support, however

I keep getting the following error:

Illegal field value PV: kohzu:m1 motor_init_record_com(): card does

not exist!

My guess is that EPICS is looking for a VME card since VME_IO is

listed as address type in devKOhzuMotor.dbd file and can't find it for

obvious reason. I'm just starting building EPICS applications, so

hopefully there's an obvious solution that I can't see at the moment.

Below is my IOC startup file:

# Linux startup script
< envPaths
# save_restore.cmd needs the full path to the startup directory, which
# envPaths currently does not provide
epicsEnvSet(STARTUP,$(TOP)/iocBoot/$(IOC))
# Increase size of buffer for error logging from default 1256
errlogInit(20000)
# Specify largest array CA will transport
# Note for N sscanRecord data points, need (N+1)*8 bytes, else MEDM
# plot doesn't display
epicsEnvSet EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES 64008

################################################################################

# Tell EPICS all about the record types, device-support modules, drivers,
# etc. in the software we just loaded (kohzu.munch)
dbLoadDatabase("../../dbd/iockohzuLinux.dbd")
iockohzuLinux_registerRecordDeviceDriver(pdbbase)

GpibBoardDriverConfig("L0",1,0,3,0)

dbLoadTemplate("motor.substitutions")

# Kohzu SC-800 motor controller setup parameters:
# (1) maximum number of controllers in system
# (2) motor task polling rate (min=1Hz,max=60Hz)
SC800Setup(1, 5)
# Kohzu SC-800 motor controller configuration parameters:
# (1) controller# being configured
# (2) ASYN port name
# (3) address (GPIB only)
SC800Config(0, "L0", 1)
var drvSC800debug 4

###############################################################################

iocInit

--
Konstantin Ignatyev, Ph.D.
Medical Physics & Bioengineering Dept.
University College London
London WC1E 6BT
Tel: 	+44 20 7679 2444
Fax: 	+44 20 7679 0255
Email:  [email protected]

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System