Galil Now Offers EPICS Driver Baselines

Galil Now Offers EPICS Driver Baselines October 3, 2014

Posted by Servo2Go.com in New Product Press Releases, Technical Support Information.
Tags: EPIC Driver, Galil, Galil Motion Control, Motion Control, Motion Controller, Servo2Go
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EPICS stands for Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System. It is a set of open source, distributed software tools used extensively for scientific instruments such as particle accelerators, telescopes, and other large-scale experimental installations. Using EPICS, scientists are able to network together arbitrarily complex systems of nodes, such as motion controllers, PLCs, instrumentation, and other software and hardware agents. Using a read/write protocol called Channel Access, the Input/Output controllers (IOCs), can interact while providing high-level functionality and interaction for sophisticated physics applications.

Galil now offers the EPICS Driver Baseline. As shown in Illustration 1, this software provides communication drivers and device support to create a Galil EPICS IOC. The software comes with the basic support needed for building a feature-rich IOC including the following:

– Support for the DMC-3x01x, DMC-4000, and DMC-41×3 Ethernet based controllers. Galil communications libraries allow extension to PCI-based controllers such as the DMC-18×6, DMC-18×2, and DMC-18×0. The array access feature allows easy extension to Galil’s line of RIO-47xxx PLCs.

– Basic Motor Record Support, which is an EPICS IOC Record designed specifically for motion controllers. See Table for some example fields imn the EPICS Motor Record.

Using the EPICS Channel Access feature, Galil array data can be read and written directly from the EPICS network. Coupled with DMC code embedded on the controller, the EPICS user can easily extend the EPICS support to any desired Galil firmware feature or programmable function. The array access feature, which is part of the Galil EPICS driver, allows quick deployment in an EPICS system without requiring a deep knowledge of EPICS IOC development.

Field	Description
ACCL	Acceleration, Deceleration specified in seconds. Duration of the accel/decel region.
ATHM	At home. State of HM input.
DHLM	Dial High Limit. Essentially a soft forward end of travel.
DLLM	Dial Low Limit. Essentially a soft reverse end of travel.
DMOV	Motion complete Boolean. 1 = finished; 0 = moving.Uses motion complete bit from data record.
EGU	Engineering units. Galil baseline normalized to counts/steps.
ERES	Encoder step size in EGU
HOMF	Home Forward. Set to 1 to initiate home.
HOMR	Home Reverse. Set to 1 to initiate home.
HVEL	Homing velocity.
ICOF	Integral Gain (KI normalized). Valid range; 0.0 <= ICOF <= 1.0
JAR	Jog Acceleration (EGU/s/s).
JOGF	Jog motor forward. Set to 1 to initiate jog forward.
JOGR	Jog motor reverse. Set to 1 to initiate jog reverse.
JVEL	Jog Velocity.
MRES	Motor step size (EGU)
PCOF	Proportional Gain
REP	Raw Encoder Position
RMP	Raw Motor Position. The contents of the hardware’s step-count register.
STOP	Stop motion. Set to 1 to initiate stop (ST)
VAL	Desired position. Will call a PA/PR to move the motor.
VELO	Velocity (EGU/s)
VMAX	Max Velocity (EGU/s)