MINIEPICS - AN EPICS PACKAGE FOR SMALL ACCELERATORS/EXPERIMENTS Guobao Shen*, Norihiko Kamikubota, Junichi Odagiri, Noboru Yamamoto, Kazuro Furukawa, Tadahiko Katoh High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, 305-0801, Japan Abstract EPICS is a control software tool-kit, which was developed for large accelerators. The original EPICS assumes to use VME-bus computers and a commercial license of a real-time operating system (VxWorks). However, after the version of EPICS 3.14.1, which was released in 2002, it can run on many operating systems. We are developing a customized EPICS package for small-scale accelerators and experiments, miniEPICS. In this paper, we report on the development status of miniEPICS. INTRODUCTION EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) [1, 2] is a software development tool-kit for distributed control systems, which was co-developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. It comprises an amount of software tools and components. With EPICS, application developers and designers can construct an extremely flexible control system, which can minimize the need for custom coding and help to ensure uniform operator interfaces. Usually EPICS can be divided into IOC (Input Output Controller) and OPI (Operator Interface) parts (see Fig. 1). IOC is a platform that originally assumes to use a VME front-end computer as the hardware and VxWorks (1) as the underlying target real-time operating system. OPI is a workstation that can run various EPICS tools. Most important OPI tools are used to monitor and control IOC as MMI (Man Machine Interface). Figure 1: EPICS Architecture. However, from the version of EPICS 3.14.1[3], which was released in 2002, an OSI (Operating System Independent) [4, 5] layer was introduced into the EPICS target software (iocCore), which completely encapsulated the operating system-dependent functions and resource. With the OSI layer, the iocCore can run on various desktop systems, such as Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Darwin and Windows. This means that from EPICS 3.14.1, the IOC and OPI can run on the same computer (see Fig. 1). EPICS has been used in many large-scale accelerators and astronomical observatories for many years, and has demonstrated high reliability, stability and flexibility. However, it is not easy to introduce EPICS into small- scale accelerators and experiments. One of the reasons is that the initial cost (especially for VxWorks and VME-bus computers) is considerably high for small groups. Another reason is that information for beginners is not sufficient. (a) There are many reference manuals for professionals, but not so many documents for beginners. This forces a beginner to spend too much time to understand “what is EPICS”. (b) Another problem is that there are too many tools with no selection guidance. Usually a beginner is confused, and does not know which tools should be chosen. Moreover, because the necessary tools should be installed one by one, the installation procedure is time consuming. As a result, those who wish to start with EPICS always need the help of EPICS experts. Considering the situations mentioned above, we decided to develop a customized EPICS package, “miniEPICS”, for both beginners and small-scale accelerators or experiments. MINIEPICS What is miniEPICS? miniEPICS is a customized EPICS package, which includes minimum EPICS tools, good examples and introduction documents. It aims at a small-scale system (accelerator and physics experiment), and can be used for the self-study of EPICS. The basic ideas of miniEPICS are as follows: • Start from one Linux PC and should be extendable. • Use PLC (2) with a network interface as minimum I/O. • Contain basic tools (MEDM, VDCT, etc.) only. • Include good documents and samples for beginners. In addition, we have a plan to make an installation CD of miniEPICS. A beginner should be able to install stand- alone EPICS without the help of experts. The iocCore can run with dummy signals immediately after installation. With tuning up the configuration files of IOC database, it can run for real I/O signals of example PLCs. Tools and components At present, we selected REDHAT 9.0 as the operating system for both IOC and OPI. In the future, we will allow ________________________________________ *e-Mail: <shengb@post.kek.jp> (1) VxWorks: a commercial real-time operating system by Wind River Co. Ltd. (2) PLC: Programmable Logic Controller (see Fig. 3) 2005, Hayama, Japan Proceedings of PCaPAC