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The EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) 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, experiment beam lines and other large scientific experiments. The EPICS Collaboration Meetings provide an opportunity for developers and managers from the various EPICS sites to come together and discuss their work and inform future plans. Attendees can see what is being done at other laboratories, and review plans for new tools or enhancements to existing tools to maximize their effectiveness to the whole community and avoid duplication of effort.
This EPICS Collaboration Meeting will be a one-day meeting in conjunction with the ICALEPCS 2023. The meeting will be held Sunday, October 8, 2023 in Room 11 at the Century City Convention Centre in Cape Town, South Africa. https://icalepcs2023.org/travel/
To participate in the EPICS Collaboration Meeting, you must select the EPICS workshop when you register for ICALEPCS 2023. https://icalepcs2023.org/registration-2/
If you would like to propose an oral presentation, please use the “Submit new abstract” button below.
We look forward to seeing you in Cape Town!
Justin Abraham (iThemba Labs)
Karen White (ORNL)
Welcome from the organizers and EPICS Council. Day plan.
iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator Based Science (LABS) was established in the 1980s to support the nuclear physics research community and to produce radioisotopes for nuclear medicine applications. This paper outlines the development of the iThemba LABS accelerator control system from mini-computers running RTE and CAMAC instrumentation, through to a system based on a LAN of PCs running OS/2 and in-house developed SABUS instrumentation. In the late 2000s the accelerator control system was migrated to the EPICS platform. Several drivers were developed to interface with the existing CAMAC and SABUS hardware. In 2015, in order to meet the changing technology and user requirements, iThemba LABS adopted EtherCAT as its new industrial communication standard. A number of software and tools have been developed and several hardware modules integrated and tested. A new web-based framework, React Automation Studio (RAS), was also developed in-house for operation of control systems. Many of these tools are being used at the new South African Isotope Facility (SAIF). Various applications, challenges and the ongoing and future developments using EPICS are presented.
Keywords: iThemba LABS, control system, CAMAC, SABUS, OS/2, EPICS, EtherCAT, RAS, SAIF
A brief discussion of the Oxfordshire series of EPICS Meetings.
The talk will give an overview of the Documentathon: what was achieved and what are the plans moving forward.
In a collaborational effort (ITER/HZB-BESSY/ESS/PSI), a Device Support for the OPC UA industrial SCADA protocol is under development. Goals, status and roadmap will be presented.
Recent developments and future plans for EPICS Base from the EPICS Core Developer's Group.
ESS has been moving towards using pvAccess (PVA) as its main EPICS protocol. For the commissioning round this spring, we switched the default protocol for our user applications (CS-Studio Phoebus) to PVA. The talk reports our experience of running almost exclusively on PVA, the (few) issues we encountered and comparing the experience with CA.
The ISIS Neutron and Muon Source accelerators have been controlled using Vsystem running on OpenVMS / Itaniums, while beamlines and instruments are controlled using EPICS. We outline the work in migrating accelerator controls to EPICS using the pvAccess protocol with a mixture of conventional EPICS IOCs and custom Python-based IOCs primarily deployed in containers on Linux servers. The challenges in maintaining operations with two control systems running in parallel are discussed, including work in migrating data archives and maintaining their continuity. Semi-automated conversion of the existing Vsystem HMIs to EPICS and the creation of new EPICS control screens required by the Target Station 1 upgrade are reported. The existing organisation of our controls network and the constraints this imposes on remote access via EPICS and the solution implemented are described. The successful deployment of an end-to-end EPICS system to control the post-upgrade Target Station 1 PLCs at ISIS is discussed as a highlight of the migration.
The SIRIUS synchrotron light source uses soft IOCs that extensively communicate with other IOCs and soft IOCs, in the accelerator itself and at the beamlines, to perform high level computations or orchestrations. Most of these soft IOCs are implemented in Python using the PCASpy library and, in some specific cases, the EPICS Sequencer module was also employed. This presentation not only aims to showcase these IOCs and our experience with them, but also to explore the future: our current solutions only work with the CA protocol, what are the options moving forward? Given the existence of solutions like Bluesky, which aspects of experiment control should happen in a soft IOC and which should happen somewhere else?
The Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has been in operation for over 20 years now. It originally started with a custom control system using custom hardware control boards. After adding a second independent control system to be able to handle PLCs, the arrival of new diagnostics for the accelerator with built-in EPICS support triggered the decision to fully migrate to EPICS. After a period of over 10 years the very last remaining parts of the original control system were switched off this year. This presentation will discuss the process of this decade long transition process.
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The Diamond-II upgrade Project has been awarded funding from the UK Government. This talk will present the project and the impact on the control systems.
STS Integrated Control Systems (ICS) provide integrated controls, data acquisition, computing infrastructure, and protection systems across all the STS technical areas. The development of ICS for the STS project builds on the existing SNS control system infrastructure that is based on the EPICS toolkit. This presentation will give an overview of STS control system architecture including software development environment, equipment management, device naming, and system integration.
The open source EtherCAT Motion Control (ECMC) framework originally developed at the European Spallation Source is a real-time Ethernet-based fieldbus system for distributed and synchronized systems. ECMC is built on top of the open source Etherlab master to communicate with and control EtherCAT devices, and is available as an EPICS module. The ECMC framework together with commercially available hardware is now in use at several light source facilities for digital and analog input/output and motion control for low to mid-performance applications. Here, we review the basic hardware and software requirements for a minimal EtherCAT system, the ECMC framework itself, the interface between ECMC and EPICS, and several supported motor operating modes. We will also review basic functionalities such as positioning, homing, limits, and PID loop tuning, and how more advanced features such as multi-axes synchronization, triggering, and interlocking can be used. Some recently added features will be presented as well.
Presentations and discussion about improving the cyber security profile of EPICS.
We describe a program at SLAC to truly understand accelerator cyber vulnerabilities as the exist at SLAC and similar facilities, improve accelerator cyber security generally, engage the U.S. Department of Energy in collaboration and funding and provide the concomitant upgrades to EPICS base for the accelerator community.
This talk describes plans to add a Transport Security Layer (TLS) to EPICS.