Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Dirk Zimoch <[email protected]> · Mon, 20 Mar 2017 16:13:57 +0100

Hi Martin,

On 17.03.2017 14:31, Konrad, Martin wrote:

Hi,
I have a device that comes with a command that reads an event log like so:

-> GET ERRORS
<- BEGIN ERRORS
<- 2017-03-16 17:37:52 Cooling Water Flow Error VALUE 1.9
<- 2017-03-16 17:38:13 Sensor 1 Over-Temp Error VALUE 36.7
<- 2017-03-16 17:38:24 Sensor 2 Over-Temp Error VALUE 40.2
<- END ERRORS

Note that the number of lines between the begin and end markers can
vary. There is another command for clearing the event log.

Is there any chance I can read this into either
a) a waveform of strings or
b) one huge waveform of chars?

I'm also open to suggestions on how to improve the protocol. Should I
try to convince the vendor to replace the error log by a command for
reading out the status of all error flags? I could then easily push them
into individual PVs. That would make archiving etc. easier.

Thanks,

Martin

In principle you can put the lines into a STRING waveform, using "END

ERROR" as the input terminator and newline as the array separator. But

unfortunately the lines are too long for EPICS strings.

If you really want to keep it as a list (i.e. an array) you can try to

pre-process the input with regular expression substitution (something

added recently to StreamDevice) in order to make the line shorter.

Example:
record (waveform, "ERRORS")
{
    field (FTVL, "STRING")
    field (NELM, "100")
    field (DTYP, "stream")
    field (INP,  "@XXX.proto getErrors terminal")
}

getErrors {
inTerminator="END ERRORS\n";
Separator="\n";
out "GET ERRORS\n";
in "BEGIN ERRORS\n%#/(?m)[0-9-: ]*(.*) Error VALUE (.*)/\1:\2/%[^\n]";
}

Gives you the following array:
"Cooling Water Flow:1.9"
"Sensor 1 Over-Temp:36.7"
"Sensor 2 Over-Temp:40.2"

Another thing you can do is to sort the messages into different records

using SCAN="I/O Intr" and filter on keywords like "Cooling Water Flow",

"Sensor 1 Over-Temp", etc. In this case you would have 3 records updated

for the 3 errors.

Dirk

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System