Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

in case anyone would like to see them for more info, motivation, etc....

http://www.aps.anl.gov/About/Committees/InterCAT_Technical_Workgroup/2011/20110526quintana.pdf

Cheers,
John



On 4/8/2011 12:32 PM, John Quintana wrote:

Hi,

I don't normally follow tech-talk but this thread was forwarded to me so I thought i would just add what we do

for users at the Advanced Photon Source.

1) We have a couple of custom perl scripts that monitor beam conditions and make some decisions and then send an email to a mailman list server. Beamline Scientists and users can add themselves to the list server and this includes emails to pagers Several hundred people use this now. Look under Recent Status Messages on the left hand side of here: http://www.aps.anl.gov/Facility/Status/

The mailman list forward to an APS_NOTIFY twitter feed using a third party email notification service for twitter. see http://www.twitter.com/APS_NOTIFY and http://twittercounter.com/pages/twittermail for

      the email to twitter interface.

      I am experimenting with twitter for a couple of reasons:

1) User authentication is done by twitter so I don't have to worry about that.

         2) twitter does SMS, logging, web publishing etc....

3) twitter supports extra features like SMS enable/disable of tweets. With modern cell phones you can start publishing qr-codes to easily allow users to turn notifications on and off (see the attachment but note that the codes will only work with US based carriers).

2) We have every beamline at the APS with its own twitter feed now. They are

http://twitter.com/APS_01ID http://twitter.com/APS_01BM etc.... out to

http://twitter.com/APS_34ID. Here I pipe out beamline specific messages such as their front end status beam readiness etc... on a per beamline basis.

To be honest, we only have a handful of people using this at present as we just started doing it this run period. I have a poster planned for our User meeting on this and the use of qr-codes. If you don't know what qr-codes are here is a video explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf_DNHPBV-s

The twitter feeds are fed with a standalone python application that relies on Matt Newville's python library and especially the alarm method. The program reads an xml file that contains the PV's and the tweet to be sent out when a particular condition is met. (Alternatively, it also takes a PV for a string object where the tweet can be stored). I haven't released this code into the "wild" yet. Since Matt's library deals nicely with creating alarms vis a vis caching PV channels, it is easy to add

      different tweets for different alarm conditions on the same PV.

Using this approach, I have started running a soft IOC on my Linux box to do more complex triggering based on multiple PV variables using calc objects. For example, one of the sectors here only wanted to be notified of front end shutter opening and closing when the beamline was in a certain mode. After struggling with how to build that into the xml schema, I realized that by putting the trigger logic in a database, I did not have to overcomplicate the python application with a lot of conditionals and it it is a lot more general. For example, I can implement a watchdog timer for a beamline provided there is

      a PV I can monitor for changes.

3) One of the things on my todo list is to see if integrating a service like cdyne.com

      (http://www.cdyne.com/products/communications.aspx)

will be useful. This is a cloud based communications service that you pay on a pe ruse basis. On one hand you have to pay, on the other hand, you don't have hardware to maintain.

Anyway, I thought I would add my two cents. Again, I don't usually follow tech-talk so please contact me directly or

CC: me on your response if you want me to see something.

Cheers,

John

--
John Quintana
Associate Division Director
   Mechanical and Interlock Systems
APS Engineering Support Division
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 South Cass Avenue, Bldg 401
Argonne, Illinois 60439
(630) 252-6716(ph)   (630)252-7187(fax)

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