EPICS

The Issac Newton Group use the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) for real time control of some of the Astronomical Instrumentation which is used here at La Palma. We have a designated EPICS Software Manager to deal with EPICS Software. I would like to mention Matthieu Bec who had put much effort into EPICS during his time here on La Palma.

EPICS Software Manager

Responsibility:

• Development, upgrade and maintenance of all our systems
  • INGRID (developed from scratch)
  • WYFFOS and Calibration Unit
  • ISISP
  • INTEGRAL
  • NAOMI
  • OSCA
  • USP
• Support for external and upcoming systems
  • LIRIS
• Contribute to the EPICS community (ideally promote ING's PR)
  Mattheu Bec is the author of the following extensions
  • pythonCA: presented at International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experiments for Particle System (ICALEPCS'99)
  • itclCA
  • Mattheu's own modification to the motor record

Achievements:

• common release (R3.13.1) for all system
  Originally we had 4 different EPICS releases:
  1. R3.11
  2. R3.12.2
  3. R3.12.2p8
  4. R3.12.2.RGO4
  All our applications now conform to the latest R3.13 standards. Subsequent upgrades will be greatly facilitated.
  
  
• common environment (makeBaseApp)
  We were using obsolete and poorly documented environments
  
  • UEA (support from Gemini ?)
  • SAE
  We're now using MakeBaseApp which is part of the standard EPICS base.
  Maintenance issue will be greatly reduced.
  
  
• OCS upgrade The Observer Interface at the WHT currently runs on VMS/ADAM.
  As part of the upgrade plan to UNIX, Mattheu developed new user interfaces. For this purpose he created the generic itclCA package, a set of [incr]Tcl/Tk classes combined with the tclCA extensions. All system are now delivered with UNIX interface ready to plug on the new WHT OCS.
  
  
• Version Management
  All applications and extensions are now under CVS control.

Future Developments:

• Upgrade to PowerPC VME CPU
  We intend to upgrade some of our existing instrumentation to use the Motorolla MVME5110 PowerPC CPU card.


• Upgrade to vxWorks Version 5.5 and Tornado 2.2
  In parallel with the PowerPC upgrade we will take the oppertunity to install the latest version of vxWorks.


• Upgrade EPICS to Version R3.14.2
  We also intend to install a new version of EPICS to use the new PowerPC and vxWorks software.

EPICS Software Information:

quick links access:

• EPICS at the ING (INS-EPICS-1)
• WYFFOS/CU EPICS Control Software (INS-EPICS-2)
• INGRID EPICS Control Software (INS-EPICS-3)
• INTEGRAL EPICS Control Software (INS-EPICS-4)
• ISISP EPICS Control Software (INS-EPICS-5)
• WHTOCS Upgrade - itclCA (INS-EPICS-6)
• PythonCA - Channel Access support for Python (INS-EPICS-7)
• EPICS Process Variable Naming Conventions (INS-EPICS-8)
• EPICS Universal Science Port Control (INS-EPICS-9)
• EPICS Crate Monitoring (INS-EPICS-10)

EPICS Debugging & Troubleshooting

As an aid to Duty Engineers and Software developers the information on the debugging and troubleshooting of EPICS systems is on the :- EPICS Debugging & Troubleshooting page.

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EPICS Software Manager
Last modified: Tue Aug 19 16:26:53 WEST 2003