Author: Pascual-Izarra, C.
Paper Title Page
MOPGF172 Bringing Quality in the Controls Software Delivery Process 485
 
  • Z. Reszela, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, G. Jover-Mañas, C. Pascual-Izarra, R. Pastor Ortiz, M. Rosanes Siscart, S. Rubio-Manrique
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  The Alba Controls Group develops and operates a diverse variety of controls software which is shared within international communities of users and developers. This includes: generic frameworks like Sardana* and Taurus**, numerous Tango*** device servers and applications where, among others, we can find PyAlarm and Panic****, and specific experiment procedures and hardware controllers. A study has commenced on how to improve the delivery process of our software from the hands of developers to laboratories, by making this process more reliable, predictable and risk-controlled. Automated unit and acceptance tests combined with the continuous integration, have been introduced, providing valuable and fast feedback to the developers. In order to renew and automate our legacy packaging and deployment system we have evaluated modern alternatives. The above practices were brought together into a design of the continuous delivery pipelines which were validated on a set of diverse software. This paper presents this study, its results and a proposal of the cost-effective implementation.
*http://taurus-scada.org
**http://sardana-controls.org
***http://tango-controls.org
****S. Rubio-Manrique, 'PANIC a Suite for Visualization, Logging and Notification of Incidents', Proc. of PCaPAC2014.
 
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TUB3O02 Iterative Development of the Generic Continuous Scans in Sardana 524
 
  • Z. Reszela, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, C. Pascual-Izarra, M. Rosanes Siscart
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  Sardana* is a software suite for Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition in scientific installations. It aims to reduce cost and time of design, development and support of the control and data acquisition systems. Sardana is used in several synchrotrons where continuous scans are the desired way of executing experiments**. Most experiments require an extensive and coordinated control of many aspects like positioning, data acquisition, synchronization and storage. Many successful ad-hoc solutions have already been developed, however they lack generalization and are hard to maintain or reuse. Sardana, thanks to the Taurus*** based applications, allows the users to configure and control the scan experiments. The MacroServer, a flexible python based sequencer, provides parametrizable turn-key scan procedures. Thanks to the Device Pool controllers interfaces, heterogeneous hardware can be easily plug into Sardana and their elements used during scans and data acquisitions. Development of the continuous scans is an ongoing iterative process and its current status is described in this paper.
* http://sardana-controls.org** D. Fernandez-Carreiras, Synchronization of Motion and Detectors and Cont. Scans as the Standard Data Acquisition Technique, ICALEPCS2015*** http://taurus-scada.org
 
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WEPGF148 Unifying All TANGO Control Services in a Customizable Graphical User Interface 1052
 
  • S. Rubio-Manrique, G. Cuní, D. Fernández-Carreiras, C. Pascual-Izarra, D. Roldán
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • E. Al-Dmour
    MAX-lab, Lund, Sweden
 
  TANGO is a distributed Control System with an active community of developers. The community features multiple services like Archiving or Alarms with an heterogeneous mix of technologies and look-and-feels that must be integrated in the final user workflow. The Viewer and Commander Control Application (VACCA) was developed on top of Taurus to provide TANGO with the user experience of a commercial SCADA, keeping the advantages of open source. The Taurus GUI application enables scientists to design their own live applications using drag-and-drop from the widget catalog. The VACCA User Interface provides a template mechanism for synoptic-driven applications and extends the widget catalog to interact with all the components of the control system (Alarms, Archiving, Databases, Hosts Administration). The elements of VACCA are described in this paper, as well as its mechanisms to encapsulate all services in a GUI for an specific subsystem (e.g. Vacuum).  
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THHC3O03 Effortless Creation of Control & Data Acquisition Graphical User Interfaces with Taurus 1138
 
  • C. Pascual-Izarra, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernández-Carreiras, Z. Reszela, M. Rosanes Siscart
    ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • T.M. Coutinho
    ESRF, Grenoble, France
 
  Creating and supporting Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for experiment control and data acquisition has traditionally been a major drain of time and resources for laboratories. GUIs often need to be adapted to new equipment or methods, but typical users lack the technical skills to perform the required modifications, let alone to create new GUIs. Here we present the Taurus* framework which allows a non-programmer to create a fully-featured GUI (with forms, plots, synoptics, etc) from scratch in a few minutes using a "wizard" as well as to customize and expand it by drag-and-dropping elements around at execution time. Moreover, Taurus also gives full control to more advanced users to access, create and customize a GUI programmatically using Python. Taurus is a free, open source, multi-platform pure Python module (it uses PyQt for the GUI). Its support and development are driven by an active and welcoming community participated by several major laboratories and companies which use it for their developments. While Taurus was originally designed within the Sardana** suite for the Tango*** control system, now it can also support other control systems (even simultaneously) via plug-ins.
* Taurus Home Page: http://taurus-scada.org** Sardana Home Page: http://sardana-controls.org*** Tango Home Page: http://tango-controls.org
 
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