EPICS DEVICE/DRIVER SUPPORT MODULES FOR NETWORK-BASED INTELLIGENT CONTROLLERS

Modern accelerator control systems adopt a wide variety of intelligent controllers to interface front-end computers with active components of the accelerator. Recently, some of the intelligent controllers come equipped with an Ethernet interface, giving an opportunity to use a network as a kind of field busses. However, developing device drivers for the use of such controllers is a complex and time-consuming process in most cases. It is essential to have the drivers share as much of their codes as possible while leaving flexibility to adapt to various proprietary communication protocols. We developed a set of device/driver support modules for the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) to support several network-based intelligent controllers, such as Program-able Logic Controllers (PLCs) and Device Interface Modules (DIMs). The software consists of a common driver module, a common device support module, and a device-specific module for each of the devices to be supported. The common driver module encapsulates the details of the programming for communication over the network. The common device support module encapsulates the details of the framework of EPICS for asynchronous I/O transactions. We decided to implement the common modules in such a manner that the device specific modules can be implemented by using only standard UNIX libraries. As a result, it turned out that the developed device-specific modules were compliant with both EPICS 3.13 on VxWorks and 3.14 on Linux.