Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Hi EPICS community,

 

I searched the tech-talk forums and documentation for this answer for a long time, because I am confident it’s in there somewhere if I could just search the correct words. However, after a long search, I decided I would stop and ask the forum.

 

How can I represent a command to a device (using StreamDevice) for a command that does not involve a process variable?

 

For example, let’s say I have a device that has a single LED. It may accept two commands over RS232 such as:

 

DecreaseBrightness

IncreaseBrightness

ToggleOnOff

 

Since these commands operate on internal states to the device rather than states we as the user can access, we don’t actually have a PV state accessible directly to put into an EPICS PV. We just want to call those methods remotely from EPICS.

 

How can I basically send the above commands like I would in a Serial Terminal, but with EPICS?

 

My approach right now is to call them binary outputs (bo) records, e.g. a bo record named “MYLED:IncreaseBrightness” and then just ignore the PV value itself. Then I do “caput MYLED:IncreaseBrightness 1” every time I want to increase brightness. Is that a reasonable approach?

 

Thanks!

 

Scott