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EPICS Control Systems course

Sponsoring University:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Course:

EPICS Control Systems

Instructors:

Andrew Johnson, Argonne National Lab and Eric Norum, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

This course will introduce students to the tools and techniques used to develop distributed control system applications with the EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) toolkit, emphasizing the IOC (Input Output Controller) side of development more than the construction or use of client applications. The audience for this course will include electronic engineers, software developers, scientists and operators at laboratories and experimental facilities that are using or considering the use of EPICS.

• Experience of using Linux and/or Unix from the command-line
• Some programming experience in Java, C or C++
• Familiarity with the concepts of networked control systems
  

It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that they meet the course prerequisites or have equivalent experience.

Objectives
By the end of this course, students will:

• Understand the general architecture of a distributed control system based on EPICS.
• Know the capabilities of the Channel Access protocol and client library.
• Be able to use various Channel Access client programs to display and modify information held in an IOC.
• Understand the EPICS database concepts of records, fields and links, record processing, device support and alarms.
• Be able to create, debug and run simple soft IOC control applications using databases and State Notation Language.
• Understand the ways in which EPICS can be extended to interface with new kinds of hardware and software.

The course consists of lectures and practical exercises in roughly equal proportion. Students will also be given a homework project to complete. All exercises and assignments will require the use of EPICS tools on workstations running Linux, for which students will work together in groups of 2 or 3 per PC.

The course will be based on recent versions of EPICS Base, the SNL Sequencer, AsynDriver and Streams, plus various client-side applications.

There are no required texts. The course will refer to the latest applicable versions of the EPICS documentation, available online through the classroom workstations.

Students will be evaluated based on their project work (50%) and final exam (50%).

IU/USPAS course number P671