NEW CONTROL SYSTEM FOR THE SPES OFF-LINE LABORATORY AT LNL-INFN USING EPICS IOCS BASED ON THE RASPBERRY PI

SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) is an ISOL (Isotope Separation On-Line) type RIB (Radioactive Ion Beam) facility under construction at the LNL-INFN (Italy) dedicated to the production of neutronrich radioactive nuclei by uranium fission. The project adopted EPICS as general frame for the control system. An off-line laboratory has been developed to study the test bench of the ISOL target front-end and the related controls. With the perspective to test new solutions for the control system components, the implementation of a new EPICS IOC developed at LNL was developed and studied. The IOCs are based on the low cost computer board Raspberry Pi with custom-made expansion boards. The expansion boards consist on multi-channel 16bits ADCs and DACs, digital inputs and outputs and stepper motor drivers. The operating system is a modified version of Debian Linux running EPICS soft-IOCs. This development allows to check the flexibility of this solution with the goal to have a distributed control system based on customized IOC for controlling the instrumentation devices as well as to read the information from the field using the EPICS channel access as communication protocol. This solution is expected to be very cost effective and easy to customize.