Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hello good people,

Our company manufactures a line of radiation detectors that can be controlled and report data by-way-of RS232 connections using ASCII characters and/or binary.  The monitors include both a standard built-in RS-232 serial port and a built-in USB port using FTDI chip. (FTDI devices now supported in Ubuntu 11.10, kernel 3.0.0-19 http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm )

Our monitors default to 9600 baud, 8 data, 1 stop and can be used with RS-232 to Ethernet Serial Device Servers such as: http://www.moxa.com/product/Serial_Device_Servers.htm RS232 to WiFi, GSM modems, etc.

An overseas customer of ours is converting their nuclear facility to EPICS and they would like to use it to, among other things, gather data from and control our monitors.

They state: “As regard EPICS, we are now first stage which install the base configuration of EPICS (3.14.12 VERSION) at Ubuntu 14.04.  We are testing (editing and compiling) and learning the saving the data (histogram), alarming and reporting procedure.”

An example command for our monitor: If one sends it the four characters: BELL,P,CR,LF the monitor responds with an ASCII string floating point number terminated with CRLF, indicating the current reading.

The other commands are similar.

I previously mentioned to the customer that perhaps the StreamDevice is the best approach and that a protocol file (aware.proto) is needed along  these lines:

Terminator = CR LF;
 
# Get the current reading. Send BELL character (\a) and P character to get reading which is a float.

get_aware_reading {
    out "\aP"; in "%f";
}

A db file (aware.db) perhaps like this:
record (stringout, "$(P):get_aware_reading")
{
    field (DTYP, "stream")
    field (OUT,  "@aware.proto info $(BUS)")
}

A CMD file perhaps like this:
dbLoadDatabase " /streamApp.dbd"
streamApp_registerRecordDeviceDriver

#where can protocols be located?
epicsEnvSet "STREAM_PROTOCOL_PATH", ".:protocols:../protocols/"

#setup the busses

#drvAsynIPPortConfigure "L0", "localhost:40000"
vxi11Configure "L0","gpib-dz-1",0,0.0,"gpib0",0,0

#load the records
dbLoadRecords "aware.db","P=DZ,BUS=L0 28"

var streamDebug 1
iocInit

#enable debug output
var streamDebug 1

I gleaned the above from an example but am not sure what much of it means, for example dbLoadRecords "aware.db","P=DZ,BUS=L0 28"

I also did not see in the example how to set the baud rate, etc.

StreamDevice might be overkill so my question is, if the customer wants to periodically poll the monitor for current reading and do something with it, for example plot, sound an alarm, etc. which would be the best solution StreamDevice, asynDriver or some other solution?

I would like to provide the customer with as much information as possible regarding using our monitors with EPICS particularly since they are on the EPICS learning curve, so any and all information and specific examples to accomplish the above would be most appreciated.

Best Regards / Bryan Boardman / Manager / Aware Electronics Corp

Web Site:
http://www.aw-el.com
E-Mail:
[email protected]