Bluesky is a collection of Python libraries co-developed by a multi-facility collaboration to enable high-level experiment orchestration and data acquisition. It has growing adoption at facilities around the world. Bluesky is designed to leverage and interact with existing libraries and software in the scientific Python ecosystem. The various components of Bluesky may be used together, as a...
We would like to show you a simple installation of a small experiment. The idea here is to get as simple as possible to a Data acquisition so that the start in the EPICS world is easy.
The individual steps are:
Install all needed support modules via a script.
Download freely available drivers and IOCs from the internet, e.g. Eurotherm2k.
Get an own IOC up and running.
EPICS Tutorial with VM.
The CLS was announced in 1999. This is a brief description of the EPICS controls when it first started in operation to the present day.
For many years, StreamDevice is one of the most used and successful EPICS device supports, mainly because of its flexibility. But development has slowed down a bit. Does that mean, there is nothing more to do? Several recent modifications came from the EPICS community, mainly related to error message handling. What is needed for the future?
Though the benefits of using EPICS in a brand-new system with no prior code are well known, there are many systems which carry existing codebases - which are often substantial, or have some individual quirks specific to the given system which the users have become accustomed to and would prefer to retain. This talk presents a discussion on the rapid and robust addition of the EPICS...
In 2008 pythonIoc was developed, an EPICS IOC with an embedded Python interpreter to serve PVs calculated from other PVs using Python functions. Since then it has grown to provide more than 60 of the IOCs at DLS, including some that talk directly to hardware. In 2021 it was turned into Python module which embeds an EPICS IOC, which means you can now pip install softioc and incorporate it...
This talk will focus on enhancements to the areaDetector package since it was last presented at the 2019 collaboration meeting at ICALEPCS in New York. These include:
- New NDPluginBadPixel plugin to replace bad pixels in NDArrays.
- New plugins NDPluginBar for bar code reading and ADCompVision for general access to the OpenCV image processing.
- Enhancements to the ADGenICam...
In a collaborational effort (ITER/HZB-BESSY/ESS/PSI), a Device Support for the OPC UA industrial SCADA protocol is under development. Goals, status and roadmap will be presented.
In order to monitor Booster Ring (BR) ramping at the Canadian Light Source (CLS), ADCs were installed to measure the magnet currents.
A Python Driver was created for these ADCs to feed values into an EPICS IOC Application. A graphical interface was also created using the PyDM framework for Python-based Qt graphical interfaces.
A tool used to monitor that status of process variables and the applications that serve them
TRIUMF is preparing for the obsolescence of Motif by developing backward-compatible replacements for alh, StripTool and edm. This presentation will discuss the current state of the replacement applications TAlh, TChart and edmq which are based on the Qt system.
A new web-based EPICS alarm handler has been designed. The alarm handler GUI is built on top of the React Automation Studio (RAS) platform and the alarm and notification servers are developed in Python. The alarm handler is seeded through JSON files that populate a MongoDB database. This database is used to persist all alarm configurations, events and activity logs. At present users can be...
Vendor-supplied diagnostic tools are often useful for configuring and troubleshooting devices. In many cases, however, these tools communicate in such a way that conflicts with IOC communication, which can be inconvenient for a number of reasons. This talk discusses some reasons to develop diagnostic tools that communicate with the device entirely by sending device-level commands through a...
The ITER control system started integration and operation of in-kind deliveries in 2018. Since then, the integrated control system has been expanded with monitoring and control of ITER buildings and utilities and is poised to receive the first contributions to the distributed real-time control of the ITER machine.
A control system integration process has been defined to address the...
D-TACQ produces a range of networked DAQ systems with flexible IO configuration. Each system has "EPICS Inside", running the business logic, and publishing control, diagnostic and data points on Channel Access. The talk shows an example of customising the internal IOC to fulfill a customer function that also has general use.
Qt has two different toolkits for creating GUIs. One is the classical widgets as we know from the beginning. It is stable, which also means it is effectively in maintenance state. Another is QtQuick/Qml, with v1 appearing in Qt4.7 and v2 in Qt5 with a complete overhaul in the backend. QtQuick/Qml promotes a new, descriptive programming paradigm. This leads to simple signal/slots/property...
A brief update on new features in PyDM (Python Display Manager), and the roadmap for future work.
At the CLS, Beamline Scientists often ask for simple EPICS screens, or temporary screens for one time tasks. This talk presents and demonstrates a simple Rapid Screen Builder for EPICS with the goal that any Beamline Scientist can quickly create a simple screen in minutes, if not seconds, with no programming whatsoever. The Screen Builder presented here is just a simple prototype, developed...
pySTXM is a data collection application for STXM beamlines that attempts to use UI idea’s borrowed from Adobe Photoshop and Blender to create a user interface that facilitates learning and decreased data collection time by reducing users ability to make mistakes that waste “shutter time” during the average beamline shift. Among its features are tools for interactive user/data experience, an...
An update from the CS-Studio and Phoebus collaboration about recent developments in the core framework and the various applications and tools built on it.
The presentation will explain using Python to make Excel EPICS-aware. This same technique can be applied to any application that acts as an "Automation Server"; such as AutoCAD, MS Word and other programs in the Microsoft Office "Productivity" Suite.
The mechanism that exposes these "automation objects" is implemented at the O/S level, so any language that can make system calls can control...
Background: Setting up firewalls on EPICS IOC's are a troublesome
matter. When multiple IOC's run on a server, all but the first
one uses random port numbers to establish connections to clients,
whereas openings in firewalls tend to be defined by fixed
port numbers. Purpose: Dynamically manage firewalls as IOC
applications come and go. Method: A prototype service...
For more than ten years, NSLS-II have provided Debian packages for many EPICS parts and tools to the community as a public repository. The packaging effort is shared and hosted at GitHub's epicsdeb organization. Following recent changes at BNL and the departure of key persons, this established collaboration is at risk.
Other institutes have been packaging for RHEL, but as more or less...
How much work would it take to support the PV Access and/or Channel Access protocols over IPv6, and how urgently are they needed? This talk may have more questions than answers, but US DOE Laboratories are being required to adopt IPv6 or to request a waiver. It won't be too long before new experimental control systems will have to run on IPv6-only networks, so to survive in that era EPICS...
EPICS IOCs at Diamond Light Source are built, deployed, and managed by a set of in-house tools that were implemented 15 years ago. This paper will detail a proof of concept to demonstrate replacing these legacy tools and processes with modern industry standards.
IOCs are packaged in containers with their unique dependencies included. A layered approach to container design ensures that disk...
Recent developments and future plans for EPICS Base from the EPICS Core Developer's Group.
LUME-EPICS is a dedicated Python API and related server that provides an EPICS interface for machine learning and physics-based simulation models using variable representations defined in the LUME-Model package, which enforces minimal data requirements for serving model variables. The server is configurable for use with either Channel Access, pvAccess, or a synchronized dual server, accepting...
PVA is started to be used by the Supervisory System to configure and monitor the numerous plant systems. The PVA structure can be very complex. Archiving this data and being able to access individual element are key requirements. In this talk, we will present the requirements, the work done on archiving and retrieving PVA data and the next steps.
React Automation Studio: A New Face to Control Large Scientific Equipment. A new software platform to enable the control of large scientific equipment through EPICS has been designed. The system implements a modern tool chain with a React frontend and a Python backend as a progressive web application. This enables efficient and responsive cross platform and cross device operation. A general...
Over the last few years, FPGA-based systems for high resolution data acquisition and high frequency control have taken significant relevance in the field of high energy physics and other associated research. When working with such varied embedded systems based on, for example, Zynq Ultrascale and Zynq-7000 series, it is necessary to create a method to build ad-hoc linux-based OS for the...
Particle accelerators are complicated scientific tools which are composed of tens to thousands of coupled components (depending on accelerator size) including accelerating RF cavities and magnets used to focus and bend charged particle beams. EPICS is one of the most useful tools in existence for accelerator component controls and for accelerator diagnostics. In this talk I present some recent...
Archiverappliance-datasource is a Grafana plugin that connects Grafana to the EPICS Archiver Appliance with the purpose of allowing users to create visualization dashboards and alerts. We’ve added a back-end component to this plugin to allow users to create realtime, continuously monitoring alerts based upon EPICS process variables. Our work compliments the initial front-end work completed at...
DevIOC is a package that enables EPICS IOC Soft Device support all within python. It allows you to define the IOC database model as a python class, and to use the model to rapidly develop dynamic, IOC servers.
The EPICS Council works to optimize the use of resources to ensure the ongoing viability of EPICS as the control system toolkit of choice for scientific facilities. This talk will give a short summary and overview of the work in the EPICS council since the last collaboration meeting.
