Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia
In a physics facility containing numerous instruments, it is advantageous to reduce the amount of effort and repetitive work needed for changing the control system (CS) configuration: adding new devices, moving instruments from beamline to beamline, etc. We have developed a CS configuration tool, which provides an easy-to-use interface for quick configuration of the entire facility. It uses Microsoft Excel as the front-end application and allows the user to quickly generate and deploy IOC configuration (EPICS start-up scripts, alarms and archive configuration) onto IOCs; start, stop and restart IOCs, alarm servers and archive engines, etc. The DCDB tool utilizes a relational database, which stores information about all the elements of the accelerator. The communication between the client, database and IOCs is realized by a REST server written in Python. The key feature of the DCDB tool is that the user does not need to recompile the source code. It is achieved by using a dynamic library loader, which automatically loads and links device support libraries. The DCDB tool is compliant with ITER CODAC (used at ITER and ESS), but can also be used in any other EPICS environment.
