LIVE CAPFAST SCHEMATICS IN THE ISAC CONTROL SYSTEM
R. Nussbaumer · 2007
For the EPICS-based control system of the ISAC radioactive beam facility, the Capfast schematic editor is used to design EPICS IOC runtime databases. This graphical tool provides a view of the database with strong visual cues about the functional behavior of the database elements and their inter-relationships, modularity, and hierarchy. The EDM display manager tool is used for the Human-Machine-Interface, providing a graphical view of the accelerator state to machine operators. This paper describes a new tool Sch2Edl, which combines some of the functionality of Capfast and EDM. Sch2Edl creates a view of the runtime database in a format geared toward the system developer/tester/debugger. Sch2Edl is a perl script that translates a set of Capfast schematic files into a corresponding set of EDM screens. The visual representation of the runtime database on the EDM display is nearly identical to the static Capfast views and hierarchies, but incorporates the display of online runtime data. This allows software developers to examine and modify some aspects of a working runtime database in an environment that is rich in visual information.