The Fermilab Accelerator Directorate Robotics Initiative is working to develop and deploy robots in the accelerator tunnels to aid in observation and measurements in harsh environments to reduce personnel exposure and beam-off time. Longer term goals of the collaboration include telemanipulation of parts, autonomous navigation, and automation of repetitive tasks. One possible method of...
Fermilab has not been a traditional EPICS house, though there have been and still are some instances on site. We have now deployed an infrastructure designed to simplify, non-expert building of EPICS applications, both IOCs and user applications using a CI/CD pipeline. The status of this EPICS deployment at Fermilab will be summarized.
A short overview of the EPICS documentation on the web will be presented, along with some new ideas to make the documentation easier to find and also make it easier to contribute to documentation.
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.
To support ITER's remote participation plans while honoring cybersecurity requirements, we are currently developing a new implementation of an "EPICS Diode", mirroring EPICS PVs through a strictly one-directional network connection.
Back in March, Diamond was hosting the 2023 EPICS Codeathon event.
Diamond are working on developing Ophyd v2, part of the Bluesky framework.
Ophyd v2 uses lessons learnt from Ophyd and Malcolm, the hardware scanning engine at DLS.
The key design concerns are modularity, separation of logic and I/O,
easy to implement hardware triggered scanning solutions and a clear migration path.
Currently there are many new developments for RTEMS and VMEbus CPUs as a basis for EPICS 7.
These are briefly presented here.
The main focus is the support of PowerPC boards like beatnik (MVME6100), MVME3700, MVME5100 etc..
Also new board alternatives on QorIQ basis (MVME2500) are addressed.
The stored beam was achieved in the Storage Ring at NSLS-II (National Synchrotron Light Source II) in March 2014. Even since then, the beam diagnostics and control system has been providing valuable fill pattern measurement data for machine operation. The control hardware as well as software has evolved over the past decade.
In many facilities there is a need to acquire and store distributed timing-synchronized FPGA-generated data for offline data analysis, fault detection and more recently AI/ML applications. While FPGA devices can easily generate and transmit Gpbs worth of data, the task of acquiring, storing and retrieving them are not trivial. This talk, although not answering this question, tries to explore...
Control System Studio (CS-Studio) is currently in the process of transitioning from Eclipse RCP to the next UI framework called Phoebus. To ease the transition of OPI (Operator Interface) screens developed for Eclipse-based CS-Studio to Phoebus, the "opi-generator" package provides a solution that generates properly formatted XML files for both CS-Studio and Phoebus from the same Python...
RegMap is a tool used at Spallation Neutron Source to assist PLC developers with creating and testing EPICS integration with ease. PLC tags are described as a single line in Excel or CSV spreadsheet with user friendly fields. The RegMap tool converts saved spreadsheet into an EPICS database file and an OPI screen file, and allows for quick development cycle of register based devices without...
The Accelerator Controls Operation Research Network (ACORN) project is a DOE O 413.3B project with a projected cost over $135M that aims to modernize Fermilab’s accelerator control system by 2028. A part of this modernization effort is to replace the existing user applications that are used by operators and experts to control and tune the accelerator complex. These applications use a diverse...
There are many VME modules in difference system in difference facilities. These VME module become obsolete due to the VME hardware obsolescence (such as front-end computer) and lack of support of operating systems (such as RTEMS) running on the VME systems. In this talk, we will discuss the migration path of the VME board to Ethernet on FPGA for control. The upgraded module can have the same...
This talk will cover how Fermilab is currently handling the incorporation of EPICS IOCs into a traditionally all ACNET control system. Specifically, it will discuss the role of Fermilab's Data Pool Manager (DPM) which provides a common data acquisition interface across multiple hardware architectures and protocols thus simplifying the development of data analysis and display components.
An update on the recent developments from the EPICS Tools and Services collaborations. This includes the latest releases of Phoebus and improvements to middle layer services like Olog, Save Restore, ChannelFinder, etc.
The PiMega detector family deployed at Sirius uses CERN’s Medipix3RX ASIC, delivering nearly 210 Gbps worth of raw payload in the largest detectors. In new generations based on Timepix4, the worst case bandwidth considered can reach up to 1.8 Tbps.
Current software architecture has a strong decoupling between data acquisition software stack and the EPICS IOC, relegating to EPICS the role...
CSNS (China Spallation Neutron Source) has used PSI Elog as the logbook system for several years and has stored more than ten thousand logs. However, the Elog does not provide responsive or separate web pages for mobile web client. Therefore, a separate mobile web client has been developed and deployed at CSNS to provide functions of user login, reading logs, creating logs, editing logs and...
node-epics-ca is an EPICS Channel Access client for Node.js, which is intended to be used in the Node.js web applications or web services that want to directly talk to EPICS IOCs instead of an HTTP PV server. It is an FFI (Foreign Function Interface) implementation that talks to the existing EPICS Channel Access shared libraries using a third-party Node.js FFI package called koffi. This talk...