A Status Update on Hyppie – a Hyppervisored PXI for Physics Instrumentation under EPICS
James Rezende Piton, Márcio Paduan Donadio, Diego Omitto, Marco Antônio, Scaler Record · 2013
Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) has a 1.37 GeV source open to scientific community since 1997. Since 2012 the control system of its beamlines, originally designed within a proprietary Delphi/Windows platform, is going through an upgrade to the open source EPICS/Linux platform. Within this upgrade strategy, the use of off-the-shelf hardware was also considered an alternative to the original in-house developed equipment, while keeping the EPICS/Linux compatibility. A PXI chassis and its modules were made available to EPICS through the NI Real-Time Hypervisor virtualization system that allows running simultaneously EPICS/Linux and LabVIEW Real-Time in the same PXI controller, sharing a common memory block as their communication interface. This data exchange protocol is called Hyppie. It is ready for some motor, scaler and binary in/out EPICS records and channel access in the Linux layer, leaving the low-level hardware control to the LabVIEW RT layer. Nine LNLS beamlines are presently running under this system and more beamlines will move to this in the months to come.