Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Peter Jemian's post on installing EPICS on Raspberry Pi prompted me to consider that there might be EPICS on Raspberry Pi fans interested in the following:

I wanted a way to add data acquisition to the Pi. I ended up expanding the Pi via the USB port and the Morph-IC-II  from FTDI. The Moprh-IC-II has an Altera Cyclone II FPGA on board (this FPGA is several generations old but still supported). I programmed the FPGA using Quartus web-edition (free).

FTDI supplies a USB driver for the Raspberry Pi (though the one posted on their website is not current).  There are also open source drivers for the FTDI though I have not tried these.

In the end I was, with relatively little work, able to write some HDL code for the FPGA, program the FPGA from the Pi over the USB connection, and then connect an IOC on the Pi to the FPGA via the USB connection, thus creating  a simple stand alone data acquisition instrument with built-in IOC.  

Regards,

John Dobbins

Cornell University