Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Christian Pauly <[email protected]> · Wed, 15 Jul 2015 10:20:58 +0200

Dear experts
I guess i need your help / advice again:

We have bought a Trinamic TMCM-351 3-axis step motor controller, and

want to control a XY-table with this.

It communicates via USB / serial, and we want to run the soft IOC on a

connected Raspberry Pi under Linux.

From what i understand by scanning through various EPICS pages and

docs, the motor module/record, or, alternatively, the steppermotor

module should provide all i need to work with such a multi-axis setup

under EPICS.

However, from what i learn from the motor record documentation, there is

no direct support for exactly this controller.

The controller is fairly simple, and understands plain ASCII / Byte

commands send via serial port, so i am pretty sure it is very similar to

other controllers which actually are supported.

But how do i proceed now ?

Is there some kind of general interface, where i can just define the

needed commands to make the motor record work with this controller ?

Or do i have to program a full new driver (starting maybe with one of

the existing ones) ?

The documentation (i found so far) regarding setting up a controller

with motor record is really sparse.

I am not an EPICS expert, but have done some projects with epics before.

In particular i am running another similar scanning table, where i did

the complete control (for a much simpler controller) only using

streamdevice and interconnecting records. But i guess, using the

particular stepmotor records is a more elegant way to go ???

In the documentation of motor record, it says: "The following

controllers are supported IN ADDIDION TO SOFT CHANNEL SUPPORT".

What is meant with this ?

Any help or advice (including links to some more detailed how-to

documentation) is very welcome !

Best regards,

Christian

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System