GSI Installations

GSI installations

EPICS is installed on serveral group servers. lxgs11 (KS groupserver) and lxgs02 (fopi group server) For these "general" installation it is important to have root access to the machines. Some addons like the archiving tool need installed third party software. This kind of software needs normally to be installed as root with the "normal" linux

./configure
make
make install

triology. As a temporary solution on this problem I decided to do several installations in addition to the GSI wide installation. For future experiments something more efficient needs to be found.

-- MarcRStockmeier - 25 Oct 2005

GSI wide installation

JoernAdamczewski did a GSI wide installation. In order to use this installation you need to source /usr/local/pub/bin/epicslogin in your shell. (type: . /usr/local/pub/bin/epicslogin the dot and the space are important...!) This gives the following environment variables:

• EPICS_HOST_ARCH
• EPICS_BASE
• EPICS_EXTENSIONS

and the PATH is adopted after sourcing. CurrentEpicsLogin as of 25 Oct 2005.

Installed are: EPICS base, config, medm

Many thanks to JoernAdamczewski who used the installation howto the first time.

How to use the central EPICS installation

Well first forget about most of the installation description above. This you do not need anymore since someone else did it for you;-) Refer to LiveInstallationDocumentation and there subsection: Installation of the first example application which gives the test installation of an IOC.

If you know where an IOC is running you can use medm to connect to it.

some words on the IOC

Since RTFM is not my favourite task I collect here a few things to know about IOCs. The best IOC starting point is to install an example IOC as described above. Later on there should be something like a GSI template IOC (I hope not to regret this statement at some point...;-)). Anyway, a good template IOC is the example IOC until something else is available.

The IOC example gives the directoriy structure as shown in: CompleteExampleTree

In order to change the IOC-program enter :

/*yourname*IOC/*installname*App/src> This ist he Place to edit the .c files.

In order to add more database fules goto:

/*yourname*IOC/*installname*App/Db>

edit the Database files here!!!!!!!!!! Don't forget to include them to the Makefile. Run make here to install them under:

/*yourname*IOC/db>

The execution of the update of process variables is one of the next topics to be addressed.

-- MarcRStockmeier - 17 Aug 2005

some words on CA (Channel Access)

First take a look at Channel Access Documents at the central EPICS homepage. In order to understand the CA mechanism at /*epicspath*/bin/linux-x86/ some low level tools are collected there. The sources of the tools are collected at: /*epicspath*/src/catools/. The sources give the best starting point to build own ca clients/servers. Look at /*epicspath*/src/cas and /*epicspath*/src/ca for the CAserver and CAclient respectively.

Examples:

caget -h gives all options available for caget
caget marcHost:aiExample

camonitor -h gives all options available for camonitor
caget marcHost:aiExample

caput -h gives all options available for caput
caput marcHost:aiExample

-- MarcRStockmeier - 06 Sep 2005

How to use medm as a CA client

Since medm is in extensive use at HADES it was the first choice for the FOPI setup. Please find in HowToUseMedm a short introduction to it.

Current Projects

• EPICS DIM Interface as device support module
• ETRAX cross compilation (DIM and EPICS)
• ml403 Virtex 4 evaluation board
  install and run EPICS on a single PCB computer...
• Integration of CA in LabVIEW (Client and Server)
  There will be some news about the integration of the Channel Access client in the LabVIEW DSC Module soon. External EPICS PVs (Process variables) will become accessible by LabVIEW and LabVIEW could be used to implement some client applications.OC). Please check the LabviewChannelAccessPage from time to time.

-- MarcRStockmeier - 31 Aug 2005