Power is nothing without control: the DCDB
Changing the configuration of the control system in a large experimental facility, like a particle accelerator that contains numerous instruments, can be an extremely cumbersome task. Therefore, it is essential to reduce the amount of effort and repetitive work needed for adding new devices, moving instruments from beamline to beamline, etc.
The oPAC Fellow Pavel Maslov, working for Cosylab in Slovenia, has developed a control system configuration tool, which provides an easy-to-use interface to quickly configure an entire facility.
The Device Control Database tool (DCDB) uses an Excel-like front-end application and allows the user to quickly generate and deploy different configurations (EPICS start-up scripts, alarms and archive configurations) onto the system’s Input/Output Controllers (IOC).
The tool uses a relational database to store information about all the elements of the accelerator. It is compatible with the CODAC control system suite (used at facilities like ITER, ESS and ELI-NP), but can also be used in any other EPICS environment.
Pavel has created project web-page (http://users.cosylab.com/~pmaslov/dcdb/) with a detailed description, tutorial and a demo.