EPICS in the Australian SKA Pathfinder

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1 EPICS in the Australian SKA Pathfinder Craig Haskins Software Engineer 25 April 2012 ASTRONOMY AND SPACE SCIENCE

2 ASKAP Site Murchison Radio Observatory (MRO): Australia s SKA Candidate site Traditional lands of the Wajarri Yamatji

4 Project Status 30 antennas on-site in assembly or assembled MRO Central Building near completion and work on equipment installation and building acceptance tests has begun Boolardy Engineering Test Array (BETA) System Integration and Verification (at MRO) started late Antennas with Phase Array Feeds, Digital Receivers and Beamformers First fringes obtained (1 PAF + SPF L-band in) Dec 2011 Using software correlator Hardware Correlator and 6 Antenna PAF System by Mid 2012 BETA Commissioning starting in Q Developing a new (improved) Phase Array Feed system using RF-over-fibre and direct sampling technology To be used in the remaining 30 antennas from Mid 2013 ASKAP (36 antennas with PAF) to be completed by Mid 2014

5 ASKAP CSS Our main interest in CSS aside from building Engineering GUIs using BOY is the alarm system: BEAST In ASKAP, we have adopted the following CSS components: AlarmConfigTool AlarmServer JMS2RDB So far we have developed a couple of CSS plug-ins to facilitate BEAST in our system: JMS2 a plugin similar to JMS2RDB. It subscribes to Alarm messages and send then as s MoniCA Archive Reader: it allows CSS databrowser to retrieve archive data from MoniCA Server (our proprietary Monitoring Data Archiver for EPICS and other ASKAP monitoring data)

MoniCA Archive Reader MoniCA is a real-time

Radio Obervatories and adopted for use in ASKAP.

com/p/open-monica/ The CSS Data Browser uses the

reader to access archived data in general.

Browser to access archived data from MoniCA.

6 MoniCA Archive Reader MoniCA is a real-time monitoring and archiving tool used at other CSIRO Radio Obervatories and adopted for use in ASKAP. More detail at The CSS Data Browser uses the plugin org.csstudio.archive.reader to access archived data in general. We implemented a MoniCA archive reader for CSS Data Browser to access archived data from MoniCA. CSS Databrowser Access archive data using custom plugin org.csstudio.archive.reader. monica Monica Server Channel Access IOC Other Components

EPICS Database Generation for Asyn IOC The digital backend

in-house hardware controlled & monitored via EPICS IOCs

provide low level access to hardware registers through the

script generates the EPICS database from hardware register

Hardware Register Definitions Additional IOC Records

7 EPICS Database Generation for Asyn IOC The digital backend of the ASKAP signal processing chain comprises custom in-house hardware controlled & monitored via EPICS IOCs For initial development, commissioning and testing we provide low level access to hardware registers through the EPICS IOCS from Python via Py-Epics A build time Python script generates the EPICS database from hardware register definition files used by in developing firmware. Hardware Register Definitions Additional IOC Records (excel spreadsheet) Build time script EPICS Database Asyn parameter list header file

8 Documentation ASKAP has adopted Sphinx to document our IOCs and Engineering GUIs As part of the Sphinx documentation build, a Python script parses the EPICS database for inclusion in the documenation. This provides Easy lookup of database records, with alarm limits, comments, etc Indexing of database Cross referencing The same Sphinx Documentation can also be bundled with the BOY GUI serve as the User Manual for the GUI. Some ideas for future development Full Sphinx plugin Hyperlinks for database links Embed schematics from VDCT in html documentation

9 BOY Linking containers provide easy way to build complex screens Rules & Grouping Container as an alternative to custom widgets (no coding)

10 ASKAP Beamformer IOC Status Bar using linking container Each row is created with linking containers Use.DISA property of record to disable buttons via BOY rule

11 Thank you Astronomy and Space Science Craig Haskins Software Engineer t e Craig.Haskins@csiro.au w ASTRONOMY AND SPACE SCIENCE

Past, Present and Future of EPICS in ASKAP

Past, Present and Future of EPICS in ASKAP J.C. Guzman ASKAP Computing IPT Leader 26 th March 2015 SKA LMC Workshop, Trieste Italy ASTRONOMY AND SPACE SCIENCE The Evaluation/Selection Process A short history