Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Mon, 5 Mar 2012 10:49:34 -0600

Hi Jiří,

I am forwarding this email to our tech-talk mailing list as there are many 
other people on the list with more experience than I have in building and 
using EPICS on Win7 and with Modbus.

On your general points yes you can think of an EPICS IOC as a SCADA engine, 
although being open we are a lot more extensible (and less standardized) than 
most PLCs.  It is important to be aware that we do not make any promises as 
far as network security goes, EPICS traffic should be contained within a 
strongly-firewalled network since DoS attacks are trivial to create and it is 
easy to impersonate other users over the Channel Access protocol.

As you are already aware, the learning curve for EPICS is unfortunately rather 
hard; there are a number of training presentations and even videos of past 
courses available, but I'm not aware of any that would quickly address your 
particular setup.

You can run the IOC code on Windows, you won't need RTEMS at all for what 
you're wanting to do.  There are a number of sites running EPICS inside VMs.  
In both cases you will probably need to adjust your firewall settings to get 
the network connections working properly though.

Tech-talk:

Can someone with more Windows 7 experience point Jiří in the right direction 
for what he's wanting to do please.

- Andrew

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: request for config. steps
Date: Friday 02 March 2012
From: Jeřábek Jiří <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>

Hi Andrew,

Sorry for inconvenience.

I am a novice with EPICS.  I have extended SCADA, DCS,  OPC, Modbus, PLCs 
experience besides other.
I am not a comp.sci. specialist by my profession and have no practical 
experience with Linux, C++, Perl and so on.
I have experience with physical instrumentation and  industrial  field 
instrumentation.

If  I am correct, I understand  EPICS as  a generalized, scalable, open  SCADA 
engine (without particular  HMI)

As it is very diffcult, if not impossible, for me to acquire  within a short 
period  necessary  knowledge by self-study  only,  I decided to address you 
for a basic navigation help  with  setting  an EPICS client and building an 
IOC.  Maybe  a hand drawn  flow diagram  would be  initially sufficient.
I do not request  detailed cookbook at all even asking for some details 
anyway.

I would like to build a small setup having:

  * Two notebooks  with Win7
  * A small „Modbus.exe“  simulator  with Modbus TCP protocol.

The  aim is to access for simplicity only one holding register  in the Modbus 
simulator and say only for “Read” operation.

As I understand  by now,  the   IOC should be  created/built  in my situation 
on  one notebook (including a local EPICS Client), the second one   would 
support only the Modbus simulator  application.

Could you  please to give me  a rough itemized  set up skeleton for sequence 
of implementation steps?

  * What to do first, second , etc?
  * What to study  to  go across  particular steps?
  * How to build/install  an EPICS client (I want  to have only one field  
shown, exactly with the Modbus register).
  * How to  build  an  appropriate IOC  and  a its  database?

Am I able to build the EPICS stuff  under Win7 or it would be necessary  to 
boot the notebook with other OS, to use RTEMS or so…?
I have no idea…
Btw. are  anywhere  instructions  for using  virtual machines? My experience 
is that  there could be a problem with  network card  incompatibility for 
particular combination of virtual machine vs PC NIC .

With best regards,

Jiri

Jiri Jerabek
SCADA specialist
www.fzu.cz<http://www.fzu.cz>
www.eli-beams.eu<http://www.eli-beams.eu>

-----------------------------------------
-- 
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System