U.S. Particle Accelerator School
U.S. Particle Accelerator School
Education in Beam Physics and Accelerator Technology

EPICS Control Systems course

Sponsoring University:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Course:

EPICS Control Systems

Instructors:

Andrew Johnson, Argonne National Lab and Eric Norum, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab


Purpose and Audience

This course will introduce students to the tools and techniques used to develop distributed control system applications with the EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) toolkit, emphasizing the IOC (Input Output Controller) side of development more than the construction or use of client applications. The audience for this course will include electronic engineers, software developers, scientists and operators at laboratories and experimental facilities that are using or considering the use of EPICS.

Prerequisites

It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that they meet the course prerequisites or have equivalent experience.

Objectives
By the end of this course, students will:

Instructional Method

The course consists of lectures and practical exercises in roughly equal proportion. Students will also be given a homework project to complete. All exercises and assignments will require the use of EPICS tools on workstations running Linux, for which students will work together in groups of 2 or 3 per PC.

Course Content

The course will be based on recent versions of EPICS Base, the SNL Sequencer, AsynDriver and Streams, plus various client-side applications.

Reading Requirements

There are no required texts. The course will refer to the latest applicable versions of the EPICS documentation, available online through the classroom workstations.

Credit Requirements

Students will be evaluated based on their project work (50%) and final exam (50%).

IU/USPAS course number P671