Welcome to the EPICS Documentation!
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) comprises a set of software components and tools that can be used to create distributed control systems. EPICS provides capabilities that are typically expected from a distributed control system:
Remote control & monitoring of facility equipment
Automatic sequencing of operations
Facility mode and configuration control
Management of common time across the facility
Alarm detection, reporting and logging
Closed loop (feedback) control
Modeling and simulation
Data conversions and filtering
Data acquisition including image data
Data trending, archiving, retrieval and plotting
Data analysis
Access security (basic protection against unintended manipulation)
EPICS can scale from very big to very small systems. Big systems have to be able to transport and store large amounts of data, be robust and reliable but also failure-tolerant. Failure of a single component should not bring the system down. For small installations it has to be possible to set up a control system without requiring complicated or expensive infrastructure components.
For modern applications, management of data is becoming increasingly important. It shall be possible to store acquired operational data for the long term and to retrieve it in the original form. EPICS provides the tools to achieve this and to tailor the data management to the needs of the facility.
One of the most appreciated aspects of EPICS is the lively collaboration that is spread around the globe. Members of the collaboration are happy to help other users with their issues and to discuss new ideas.
How this documentation is organized
Each page is labeled by the intended audience. You may also directly use related links to see documents which match you the most.
Getting started
Installation
Application Developer's Guide
- Getting Started
- EPICS Overview (Introduction to EPICS)
- Build Facility
- Database Locking, Scanning and Processing (EPICS Process Database Concepts)
- Database Definition
- IOC Initialization
- IOC Access Security
- IOC Test Facilities
- IOC Error Logging
- Application Developer's Guide (historical pdf, for 3.16.2)
Use Cases and Design Patterns
EPICS Related Software
PV Access details
System administration
- How to Configure Channel Access
- How to find which IOC provides a PV
- How to Make Channel Access Reach Multiple Soft IOCs on a Linux Host
- How to Set Up a Soft IOC Framework on Linux
- How to Set Up Console Access and Logging for VME and Soft IOCs
- PV Save and Restore Tools available
- How To Use POSIX Thread Priority Scheduling under Linux
Internal
Contributing