1. Integrating Advantech PCI I/O cards into EPICS

2. Outline ANTARES computer control and data acquisition systems architecture STAR computer control and data acquisition systems architecture Motivation and Planning Experiences with drivers Integration with EPICS

3. ANTARES Accelerator ANTARES is an old accelerator. Purchased second-hand from Rutgers University around 1990. No computer control system (I think). Original control system developed in-house in the Nineties. Consisted of 3 VME crates controlled by Motorola 68K processor boards running OS-9. There was also a GUI computer running some flavour of UNIX. In the early 2000s we moved from VME CPU boards to PCI- to-VME interface (SIS1100/3100) and EPICS on Linux.

4. ANTARES architecture

5. STAR Accelerator Purchased from HVEE. Installed around 2002. Came with a control and AMS data acquisition systems. Runs on Windows NT4. HVEE gave us the source code around 2007. We will maintain and improve the system ourselves. We are in the process of upgrading to Windows XP.

6. Motivation Data logging system for plant equipment on the STAR accelerator. Some control may also be required. –Required ASAP. –Would be difficult to integrate into HVEE’s control system that came with STAR. –Decided to build it using EPICS and its Channel Archiver. Already have experience with these systems. Replacement for the ANTARES accelerator VME crates used in both the control and AMS data acquisition systems. –Long term goal.

7. VME or PC hardware? Why choose industrial PC setup over VME? –Price. $4700 for a rack-mounted system that provides 32 analog inputs, 32 analog outputs, 64 digital inputs and 64 digital outputs. This includes dual-core 3 GHz CPU, 8 GB RAM, HDD, I/O card cables and DIN wiring boards. –Can run other applications on the rack-mounted PCs. EDM, possibly Zoneminder. –Popular platform. Many developers are familiar with Linux on PC.

8. Why Advantech hardware? Cost effective solution that fulfills our needs. Two drivers to choose from: Advantech and Comedi. We are already Advantech customers.

9. Advantech drivers  The original plan was to use interface the Advantech drivers to EPICS using the Asyn driver framework. Advantech’s website did indicate they supported Debian 4, Fedora Core 6, etc. but since these are a few years old I assumed that Advantech had not bothered to update their website. Wrong! The Advantech Linux drivers only work on kernels up to 2.6.20. Advantech also indicated they did not support 64-bit Linux.

10. Advantech drivers I’ve had no indication from Advantech that updating their Linux drivers to a modern kernel running on a 64-bit system. They were willing to provide me all the source code for the drivers and configuration utilities though.

11. Comedi As we are running 64-bit Linux I decided to try out the Comedi drivers. The aim of the Comedi project is to provide a standard API to data acquisition cards that provide similar functionality. Analog I/O, digital I/O, counters, timers. Supported hardware list is fairly long, mainly coming from ADLink, Advantech, Amplicon, ComputerBoards, Data Translation, Keithly Metrabyte, Measurement Computing and National Instruments.

12. Comedi Basics Comedi abstracts cards into channels, sub-devices and devices. –A channel is a single analog input or digital output etc. –A sub-device is a grouping of functionally identical channels implemented on the same chip. –A device represents a card. Information about devices can be found in /proc/comedi or by using a utility that comes with Comedilib.

13. Comedi Basics When it comes to acquiring data Comedi’s API allows you to: –Synchronously acquire once on a single channel. –Synchronously do several acquisitions on a single channel. This is called an instruction. You may also specify an instruction list to synchronously perform multiple instructions on possibly different channels. –Asynchronously perform a sequence of scans. This is called a command and allows you to choose which channels to acquire on and timing between acquisitions.

14. Installing Comedi Two downloads required to install Comedi: –Comedi. The drivers. –Comedilib. The API with some demonstration programs. Installation and compilation was straight forward.

15. EPICS Comedi An EPICS Comedi support application has already been developed. Available from Sourceforge. I don’t think it’s on the EPICS website. Developed using the Asyn driver framework. Fairly painless to compile. Needed a couple of minor bug fixes. No documentation but the IOC shell script examples are enough to get you going.

16. EPICS Comedi Haven’t done extensive testing yet but looks like the PCI-1713 analog input, PCI-1752 digital output and PCI-1754 digital input are working.