LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
In the very early days of computerized accelerator control systems the entire control system, from the operator interface to the front-end data acquisition hardware, was custom designed and built for that one machine. This was expensive, but the resulting product was a control system seamlessly integrated (mostly) with the machine it was to control. Later, the advent of standardized bus systems such as CAMAC, VME, and CANBUS, made it practical and attractive to purchase commercially available data acquisition and control hardware. This greatly simplified the design but required that the control system be tailored to accommodate the features and eccentricities of the available hardware. Today we have standardized control systems (Tango, EPICS, DOOCS) using commercial hardware on standardized busses. With the advent of FPGA technology and programmable automation controllers (PACs & PLCs) it now becomes possible to tailor commercial hardware to the needs of a standardized control system and the target machine. In this paper, we will discuss our experiences with tailoring a commercial industrial I/O system to meet the needs of the EPICS control system and the LANSCE accelerator. We took the National Instruments Compact RIO platform, embedded an EPICS IOC in its processor, and used its FPGA backplane to create a "standardized" industrial I/O system (analog in/out, binary in/out, counters, and stepper motors) that meets the specific needs of the LANSCE accelerator.
