CAQTDM, AN EPICS DISPLAY MANAGER BASED ON QT
A. Mezger · 2013
At the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) the display manager MEDM was used until recently for the synoptic displays at all our facilities, not only for EPICS but also for another, in-house built control system ACS. However MEDM is based on MOTIF and Xt/X11, systems/libraries that are starting to age. Moreover MEDM is difficult to extend with new entities. Therefore a new tool has been developed based on Qt. This reproduces the functionality of MEDM and is now in use at several facilities. As Qt is supported on several platforms this tool will also run on Microsoft Windows. The MEDM data files (.adl) were used as an initial set for the new system and were converted into the new xml format using the parser tool adl2ui. These were then edited further with the QtDesigner and displayed with the new Qt-Manager caQtDM. The integration of new entities into the Qt designer and therefore into the Qt based applications is very easy, so that the system can easily be enhanced with new widgets. New features needed for our facility were implemented. The caQtDM application uses a C++ class to perform the data acquisition and display; this class can also be integrated into other applications.