We report on the progress in transitioning the ISIS source from our current control system to a PVAccess based implementation of EPICS. On the frontend efforts continue to improve automatically converted HMIs, and to improve usage of Phoebus services such as Save-and-Restore. We report on our progress in deploying and using our first conventional EPICS IOCs, and on the problems encountered in...
To support ITER’s remote participation plans while honoring cybersecurity requirements, we are developing the “EPICS Diode”, mirroring EPICS PVs through hardware devices allowing strictly one-directional network traffic.
We present the concept, implementation and status, showing the first results of scalability and performance measurements, possible enhancements and the next planned steps.
New requests and requirements for ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) diagnostics are bringing new life to the ASDEX Upgrade Tokamak. The AUG team is fighting daily with the problems of any long-lived scientific facility. The ASDEX Upgrade infrastructure, referring to both software and hardware, has been mostly created in-house. It is no longer feasible to just extend and maintain the old legacy systems....
In this presentation, I will explore the testing strategies and challenges encountered during the SARAF accelerator Phase II project, developed by CEA-Irfu for SNRC (Soreq NRC) in Israel. The SARAF control system, based on the EPICS framework, required robust, scalable, and automated testing to ensure smooth integration and reliable performance.
The talk highlights various facets of the...
EPAC will be driven by a 10Hz Petawatt laser using novel technology developed at the Central Laser Facility. Through changing parameters such as target material and geometry, applications can switch between generating high-energy x-rays and beams of high-energy electrons, protons, ions, neutrons and muons, to enable multi-modal imaging and probing capabilities.
This talk will give a brief...
Data acquisition architectures are full stack problems that impact instrumentation, FPGA based devices, timing distribution, drivers to integrate instrumentation, EPICS for online configuration and monitoring, fast storage of data, export and management of data. This report touches on the architecture and performance of system that have been deployed and a data management system that is under...
The TimePix3 detector, developed by the Medipix collaboration, has emerged as a powerful tool for neutron detection applications at Department of Energy (DOE) National User Facilities, including the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR). This presentation introduces new features and improvements in the EPICS area detector driver (ADTimePix3), specifically...
Laser facilities such as EPAC use cameras as the primary diagnostic for alignment and system monitoring. In a large facility there can be over a hundred of these cameras streaming images from different areas to a central control room, and operators may have an interest in observing tens of image sources simultaneously. This talk will give an overview of the configuration used in EPAC to...
Synchrotron beamline simulation codes have long been essential for designing new beamlines and troubleshooting existing ones. However, there remains a noticeable gap between the idealized simulation results and the performance of real beamlines. xrt X-ray tracing package addresses this challenge by employing a global coordinate system for positioning and orienting optical elements, along...
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory plans to adopt EPICS as its control software, transitioning from the Accelerator Device Object (ADO)-based control system used by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). On the hardware side, the EIC intends to migrate its front-end electronics to Zynq-based general I/O boards. As a result, our ongoing efforts focus on...
This talk will cover recent activities of the EPICS Council on behalf of the EPICS Collaboration. Discussions from previous meetings have brought forward new ideas to improve communication in the community and be more effective planning for sustainability. Topics will be described, and time will be allowed for discussion.
A collaboration (ITER/HZB-BESSY/ESS/PSI) maintains and develops a Device Support module for integration using the OPC UA industrial SCADA protocol. Goals, status and roadmap will be presented.
The compress record is a simple but powerful tool for data processing in an EPICS system. This records can provide in the IOC post-processing of data that would otherwise require high level tools. Although having been a part of EPICS for a long, long time, this is perhaps not as widely understood or used as it might be. Having this post-processing done at the IOC rather than application level,...
Historically, the SNS has had a patchwork of different ways to make equipment communicate effectively with the control network for our accelerator. Of course, there is the conventional Input/Output Controller (IOC) which houses database files loaded into a process that serves EPICS records available for clients to retrieve from Channel Access. Early in our diagnostic equipment development,...
Our customer required dark-themed graphical user interfaces for their control system. To ensure a consistent look, the default colours of Control System Studio Phoebus had to be modified. While many UI elements in Phoebus could be adjusted through CSS, significant modifications were required in the source code to achieve the desired look. Key updates included defining a unified colour scheme,...
The EPICS based control system at SNS has been in operation since 2006. Numerous upgrades have been added over time to enhance capability and performance. Almost 20 years on, we have many obsolete hardware components which require upgrades along with corresponding software upgrades. Cyber security requirements have also changed in recent years which implies changes to the control system...
This contribution presents a data acquisition and processing system implemented for a MicroTCA Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) that is based on an AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. The presentation focuses on the methodology to develop custom applications on such system,
The hardware implemented into the FPGA includes the JESD204B high-speed ADC/DAC interface, as well as PCIe connectivity for data...
IRFU software control team (LDISC2) is involved from feasibility studies to equipment deployment across various experiments that differ in size and operational duration. For many years, LDISC has been using Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) solutions to control portions of these experiments. In the context of automation programming, the organization of memory zones is crucial for efficient...
3 case studies where EPICS and AsynPortDriver proved to be invaluable.
First, a rapid scope "Judgement", second a combined slow-trend and full-rate "Fault Monitor" system, and finally an IOC implementation for exploring a post-shot stored data set.
[Omroneip][1] is a new EPICS asyn driver which is used primarily to communicate with OmronNJ/NX PLCs using the ethernet/IP communications protocol. This protocol is an adaptation of the CIP protocol over Ethernet. It supports the large forward open CIP specification as well as packing of CIP responses. The large forward open message specification uses connected messaging and supports single...
The two accelerators KARA and FLUTE at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology operate have been using EPICS for many years. In anticipation of our upcoming cSTART project, major upgrades are being made to our control system infrastructure on all levels. This includes the introduction of a fully digital camera setup based on areaDetector, migration to Phoebus for the GUI, transition to a...
When using EPICS in smaller laboratories, one is confronted with the task of selecting and procuring suitable hardware for data acquisition.
Above all, these are often very individual installations for which large numbers of hardware components of one type are not required. In these laboratories, there is usually no technical support that can carry out FPGA programming and design, etc....
At Diamond Light Source there are currently many different ways to write device support and as a result the drivers are often bespoke, don’t follow a common convention and are only understood by the engineer that wrote them. We wanted to better standardise and lower the barrier of entry to writing device drivers and to promote greater collaboration across different software groups, such as...
A programmer learns about many of the difficulties in designing and producing custom electronics. Lesson learned developing the Osprey Quartz digitizer system.
There is currently a wide variety of web tools in the EPICS community, and more and more facilities are developing or adopting them. We would like to perform a survey of tools and interested individuals, to improve visibility of these projects and to provide a space for people who are open to collaboration. A short survey will be made available, and part of the Phoebus developers session will...
The accelerator community makes use of a suite of tools called the 'Matlab Middle Layer', or MML. This provides an accelerator-agnostic interface alongside a large number of high level applications, such as slow orbit feedback, beam-based alignment, and others. Originally developed over 20 years ago, accelerator physicists and other interested people have grouped together to develop a...
Responding to user requests for a discussion and support forum that is more accessible and more intimate than the Tech-Talk mail exploder, we are introducing "EPICS Chat", based on the Matrix network for secure, decentralised communication.
web-pvtools includes a series of PV client tools that can access IOCs via web browsers. This work is inspired by epics2web and pvws, and it supports both Channel Access and PV Access. It consists of a backend and a frontend, the backend is a customized version of pvws, whereas the frontend is a single page application based on Vue.js framework and provides PV tools like caget, caput,...
The Experiment Controls team at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source has begun adoption of the bluesky & ophyd-async libraries to implement scanning and alignment workflows on neutron & muon beamlines. Early results are promising, with several beamlines now moving from a testing phase towards production use.
This talk will describe the initial use cases from neutron reflectometers, small-angle...
Integration of OAuth2 authentication within the Olog/Phoebus system, a key component of the EPICS infrastructure. The current service architecture involves multiple authentication methods, each implementing its own authentication mechanisms, leading to challenges such as inconsistent authorization flows, credential exposure and maintenance difficulties. The proposed solution leverages OAuth2,...
I will give a brief presentation discussing our work on an area detector driver for interfacing with detectors through PIXCI frame grabbers.
It currently supports two models of Raptor Photonics X-ray detectors: the Raptor Eagle XV 4240 II and the Raptor Eagle 4710 II. However, it could be expanded to support other detectors that are interfaced with via PIXCI frame grabbers.
We plan to...
ITER's operation requires complex automation sequences that are beyond the scope of the finite state machine concept that the EPICS SNL Compiler/Sequencer implements.
The Operations Applications group at ITER is developing oac-tree (Operation, Automation and Control using Behavior Trees), a new sequencing tool based on behavior trees, which has been successfully used in its first production...
The IBEX Web Dashboard
Scientists, PhD students, commercial users and operational staff at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source rely on a web dashboard in order to remotely monitor beamline-specific parameters crucial to operations.
Previously, we have used the CS-Studio Eclipse RDB Archive Engine and a bespoke server to parse information from this from the instruments, but this is a...
We introduce the development of the aplications based on Phoebus in CSNS. We made some modification to the alarm system and the alarm log table. We also created some new plugins to the Data browser. We developed a very fast Frontend-Backend-Separation snapshot management software solution
In the context of EPNix, a development and deployment framework for EPICS IOCs and EPICS-related software, I will share my thoughts about writing documentation:
- how do we architecture this documentation,
- the thought process before writing,
- the writing style,
- and how do we enforce a consistent writing style
The LDISC2 software control team is involved from feasibility studies to the deployment of equipment, covering low level (hardware, PLC) to high level (GUI supervision). For their experiments, the LDISC team is deploying two mains’ frameworks:
• MUSCADE3, a full Java in-house solution, a micro embedded SCADA (µ SCADA) dedicated to small and compact experiments controlled by PLCs...
IFMIF-DONES (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility - DEMO-Oriented NEutron Source) is a cutting-edge neutron irradiation facility under construction as part of the European fusion roadmap. Located in Granada, Spain, its primary objective is to validate and qualify materials to be used in fusion reactors. The construction phase, initiated in March 2023 following the first DONES...
IFMIF-DONES (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility - DEMO-Oriented NEutron Source) is an accelerator-based neutron irradiation facility being constructed in Granada, Spain, as part of the European fusion roadmap. Its primary objective is to generate a neutron field with a fusion-like energy spectrum to test materials for their use in fusion reactors. The construction of...
Bluesky facilities have been using ophyd as a comprehensive hardware abstraction layer for step scanning use cases but legacy constraints have made it difficult to move towards flyscanning. We present an update on the status of ophyd-async and a roadmap of future features.
For years now, the push to adopt memory-safe languages in lieu of C and C++ has been growing steadily. On the management side, it was spurred by various government-issued orders and directives. Among programmers, it was spurred by appearance of Rust as a viable contender to replace C++. The "rewrite the world" trend is going strong. However, there are open questions on how to transition an...
In the recent past rust has gained my interest.
This talk should give inspiration that rust can be used to
write useful code:
A simplified simulator for a motion controller.
Fermilab's home grown control system is now being supplemented with EPICS controls for the new accelerator, PIP-II. The two control systems will be required to operate side-by-side for the foreseeable future, where the EPICS controls is treated as green field. Here I will give a description of the deployment of our software infrastructure of "pure" PVXS with multicast, and report on the...
EPICS 7.0.9 was released in February 2025. This talk will cover what’s new and what changed in that release, some things to expect in future releases, and when the Core Developers propose to drop support for VxWorks, RTEMS-4 and some of the older MS Windows compilers.
This work is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy...
Secure PVAccess (SPVA) enhances the existing PVAccess protocol by integrating Transport Layer Security (TLS) with comprehensive Certificate Management, enabling encrypted communication channels and authenticated connections between EPICS clients and servers (EPICS agents).
This Project, funded by the the Department of Energy and Awarded to **Stanford National Accelerator...
The FMX (Frontier Microfocusing Macromolecular Crystallography) beamline at the NSLS-II light source has developed a new experimental station for fixed target time-resolved serial crystallography on biological systems. We present here the controls-system for a chip scanner which enables the rapid collection of large numbers of room temperature crystallographic measurements on biological...
Recent changes to the PVXS module.
The EPICS Archiver Appliance is a vital part of the EPICS technology stack, storing PV data that is essential for data analysis and diagnostics. We have developed a new Phoebus datasource that allows archived data to be accessed as if it were a live PV. This provides a powerful tool for debugging client behavior and developing applications that interact with simulated control system elements,...
This talk provides an update on the upcoming TRISHUL facility at TIFR Hyderabad, which will use a high-intensity, ultra-short petawatt laser for research activities and the key plan is to integrate an EPICS-based control system to enable seamless operations.
ICONE is a pre-project that aims to develop an innovative compact neutron source using HiCANS technology (High-Current Accelerator-driven Neutrons Sources). The CEA IRFU, thanks to its extensive experience with various accelerators such as SPIRAL2, ESS, IPHI, and SARAF, is responsible for the design of the Linac. This presentation will introduce our updated software and hardware platforms that...
The controls system for the ISIS accelerator is being migrated from using the commercial software Vsystem to EPICS. The primary protocol used for transporting process variables (PVs) across the network is pvAccess and the Python-based software p4p is used to create servers that provide access to process variables using PVA servers. A custom wrapper for p4p is being implemented to simplify and...
The European Spallation Source (ESS) is currently undergoing accelerator commissioning and already has more than 3,000 IOCs registered, producing over 8 million process variables (PVs). To manage this scale in a sustainable and maintainable way, we have been developing the Controls Ecosystem (CE): a management system designed to streamline the lifecycle of control system components. CE is a...
The European Spallation Source Timing System is based on MRF hardware and mrfioc2 EPICS module and driver. In order to provide a flexible and EPICS based way to control our Timing System a software interface based on Normative Types was developed. This new interface was built using PVXS C++ library and the EPICS Normative Type used was the NTTable. The Timing IOC, CSStudio/Phoebus and...
The ISIS Controls System transition to EPICS instersects with legacy hardware upgrades. This work presents the development of a robust EPICS-based (p4p) serial driver for interfacing with serial devices, mainly power supplies, via Moxa TCP terminal servers. The driver supports multiple serial device types, handling reads, writes, and instructions with redundant data restoration and alarm...
We introduce a LabVIEW library implemening Channel Access client and server. Server can host basic EPICS records and works as EPICS IOC with device support for LabVIEW. The library has no dependencies outside LabVIEW and can be easily deployed to any National Instruments target.
The ISIS Accelerator Diagnostics group uses National Instruments PXI and cRIO hardware, programmed with LabVIEW, for our data acquisition systems. As we are transitioning to EPICS as our control system, a need has arisen for a direct LabVIEW to PVAccess interface. This talk will cover my progress from requirements to a working prototype that integrates the PVXS C++ library into the LabVIEW...
With the increasing use of p4p IOCs at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source there is a need for RecCaster Python integration to allow, for example, use of ChannelFinder. The current implementation of the EPICS RecCaster tool is written in C++/C and is dependent on the EPICS base/modules libraries. Recsync-rs, a RecCaster library in Rust, and PyRecCaster Python bindings with cross-platform support...
Notes on using the pvAccess protocol in a virtualised environment, with an emphasis on our use with Docker Swarm. pvAccess's use of UDP broadcast for search and beacon messages presents problems in a virtualised environment. We outline our solutions utilising the EPICS_PVA_NAME_SERVERS environment variable, PVA Gateways, and UDP broadcast relays.
Development of device support for EPICS software infrastructure is challenging process, it requires in-depth knowledge of EPICS device drivers, database records, IOC toolchain and EPICS GUI. Due to complexity of the EPICS PVA protocol, implementation of the IOC on embedded hardware is practically impossible, especially for multi-client applications. To simplify this task a simple hardware...
The presentation presents the current status of migrating INFN-LNF custom control systems to EPICS using EPIK8s, a containerization and orchestration framework that seamlessly integrates EPICS applications into Kubernetes environments. EPIK8s, an implementation of the DLS epics-containers framework developed at INFN-LNF, leverages modern container technologies to overcome the challenges of...
