Patrick T, Daniel S

This was a long time coming, but we finally have an automatic medm/adl generator for the EtherCAT system. For each data structure in TwinCAT, we generate 3 screens:

• A record screen in table format which contains all fields,
• An error screen which contains the error status including the individual error messages, and
• A brief error message screen which can be imported into other medm screens to indicate the status.

The attached screen shot shows a couple of examples for the x end station. The screen at the lower left is the overview screen accessible from the sitemap under the SYS button. The two screen at the top left are record and error screens for H1:ALS-X. All fields are substructures which link to other screens. The two screens to the right show the record and error screens for H1:ALS-X_REFL_LOCK. The fields represent mbbi, ao, ao, ao, (substructure link), bi, longin, bo, longout, and longout EPICS records in this order. The errors are individual messages with no further links. 

The generation is done in two steps:

• The TwinCAT EPICS ioc produces an aml file for each structure it encounters based on the tpy file (which is also used to generated the EPICS database). The ioc also reads the lists of error messages which are stored in separate files. The aml file contains the necessary macro substitutions for the final medm screens.
• The installation script to restart the EPICS interface generates the actual medm screens after the ioc has started up and finished its initialization work . The medm screens get installed in $(USERAPPS)/ecat/h1/medm at LHO.

For this to work Patrick had to modify how the error messages are stored in the TwinCAT code. We now have a constant array of strings containing them rather than hardcoded in the code. There is one of these for each structure type which gets written to a separate file with extension exp. This change should be transparent.

The updated code and scripts have been installed in the x end station. Screens are available for all stations, but for the vertex and y end they could be slightly out of synchronization until we upgrade them as well.