COMMON DEVICE ACCESS FOR ACCELERATOR CONTROLS

An accelerator control system must in general support a variety of hardware devices, and more often than not, a variety of different field bus types. It is very tedious to write control software dealing with the different bus types at the driver level without an overlying systematic interface. The problem of supplying the control system engineer with a common device interface, regardless of field bus, has been tackled with great success by control systems such as EPICS [1], COACK [2], and DOOCS [3], but has as yet received little attention in TINE [4]. We report here on the first efforts to provide a multi-language, multi-platform, generic device interface for the TINE control system. Specifically, the goal is to offer via the TINE client interface a generic view of such disparate busses as USB, CAN, RS232, GPIB, PROFI, VME and SEDAC. The developer must be able to access all of the features of the underlying bus if desired but at the same time be unaware of the details. With this scheme, fully functional and extensible TINE servers can be generated using the TINE server wizard; simple generic servers can offer simple device control via database configuration; and by using the TINE client interface, the server redirection feature allows an engineer to develop a server from a remote location