Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Chestnut, Ronald P." <[email protected]> · Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:00:51 -0700

Jay,

The timer starts when the state containing the when clause is entered. There are some flags which determine if it restarts when the state loops back to itself or not.

So the order of elements in the when expression is irrelevant.

If you want some specific ordering, you need to use more states.

Ron

On Aug 10, 2011, at 9:01 AM, Jay Steele wrote:

Hi EPICS folks,
  For the state notation language, the when statement is mostly straightforward in that the code following the when statement occurs when the logical expression inside the when statement is true. However, I'm a little confused by the delay function in a when statement because something needs to start and monitor the timer for the delay. I need to understand this delay logic better for a EPICS robot control application I'm working on. When does the timer start and how is it monitored for the delay? For example, if I use the following when statement for a state transition,

when(A==1 && delay(1.0) && B==1),

  does the timer for the delay only start and continue after the A==1 logical condition is met and, after the delay is done, then it checks the B==1 logical condition? Thus, does the order of logical conditions in the when statement make a difference so that when(delay(1.0) && A==1 && B==1) behaves differently? Here is one possible interpretation of when(A==1 && delay(1.0) && B==1):

time     A     B    transition
-----    ---    ---   ----------
0         0      0    none
1         0      0    none
2         1      0    none
2.5      1      1    none
3         1      0    none
4         1      1    yes

  Or, does the timer for the delay only start and continue after both the A==1 and B==1 conditions are satisfied? In which case, we get the following result for when(A==1 && delay(1.0) && B==1):

time    A        B    transition
-----   ---      ---    ----------
0        0        0       none
1        0        0        none
2        1        0       none
2.5     1        1       none
3        1        0       none
4        1         1      none
5        1         1      yes

Or does the timer for the delay start as soon as the state containing the when statement becomes active and just continue? In this case, the results would be as follows for when(A==1 && delay(1.0) && B==1).

time    A     B    transition
-----   ---   ---   ----------
0        0      0      none
1        0      0      none
2        1      0      none
2.5     1      1      yes

  I will test these different situations out, but I wanted to understand the underlying logic intent so that my SNL implementation will not break with future software versions.

Cheers,
Jay Steele
Xradia Corporation

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System