Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hi Steve,

 

A while ago (a couple of years) I went through this process and tried out a few different EPICS-LabVIEW integration libraries. My first choice was also this NI supplied LabVIEW add-on. However, I had trouble getting this working well:

·         There is a significant lack of documentation even to help you get started, let alone to understand how it does Channel Access I/O.

·         I have had some trouble to get the add-on installed and working – and others have reported the same. See http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/tech-talk/2010/msg00277.php

·         Once running I found that I couldn’t get array/waveform to work (possibly not supported at all)

·         Setting up shared variables is far too complicated for some of our novice LabVIEW users

 

I had a lot better experience with the CA Lab library http://www-csr.bessy.de/control/SoftDist/CA_Lab/ This worked straight out of the box for me and the documentation is excellent to get you started. Also it uses the native EPICS ca and Com libraries and makes the source code available so you can understand how it really works. I recommend going with that for any new project.

 

Cheers,

Ulrik