PSI System Controls and Diagnostics
F3200E User Manual
F3200E_UM_180726 Page 61 of 107
13
IG2 and EPICS Connections
13.1 What is EPICS?
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS,
http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/
)
is:
“A set of Open Source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and
used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such
as particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific experiments. EPICS uses
Client/Server and Publish/Subscribe techniques to communicate between the various computers.
Most servers (called Input/Output Controllers or IOCs) perform real-world I/O and local control
tasks, and publish this information to clients using the Channel Access (CA) network protocol.
CA is specially designed for the kind of high bandwidth, soft real-time networking applications
that EPICS is used for, and is one reason why it can be used to build a control system comprising
hundreds of computers.”
Pyramid supplies an executable called IG2 which embeds an open source Channel Access Server
from the EPICS community. This allows connection via the Ethernet interface. IG2 is
configured for the devices you wish to connect using editable xml files. Once IG2 is running on
a computer in your network, then any other computer can run a client program which can display
and control the process variables for the devices. In the simple network in figure 50, the process
variables of a F3200E and an M10 plus H20 attached to the F3200E via fiber optics, are exposed
to the network by the IG2 service running on a server computer. One or more client GUI
computers can then access the values.
Ethernet
F3200E
M10
M10
H20
Fiber optic
IG2 server
GUI computer
Router / switch
Figure 50. Simple example network for EPICS communications.
