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<h1>
areaDetector: EPICS Area Detector Support</h1>
<h2>
August 15, 2009</h2>
August 23, 2009</h2>
<h2>
Mark Rivers</h2>
<h2>
@@ -68,6 +68,7 @@
<li><a href="areaDetectorViewers.html#IDLViewer">IDL Viewer</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#Installation">Installation, configuration, and startup</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
&nbsp;</p>
@@ -1793,5 +1794,146 @@
<p>
<b>ADEpicsShutter.adl</b></p>
<img alt="ADEpicsShutter.png" src="ADEpicsShutter.png" /></div>
<h2 id="Installation">Installation, configuration, and running</h2>
<h3>
Installation: source code version</h3>
<p>
After obtaining a copy of the distribution, it must be installed and built for use
at your site. These steps only need to be performed once for the site (unless versions
of the module running under different releases of EPICS and/or the other required
modules are needed).</p>
<ol>
<li>Create an installation directory for the module, usually this will end with<br />
<br />
<tt>.../support/</tt>
<br />
</li>
<li>Place the distribution file in this directory. Then issue the commands (Unix style)
<pre>tar xvzf areaDetectorRX-Y.tgz
</pre>
where X-Y is the release.</li>
<li>This creates a &lt;top&gt; application.<br />
<pre>.../support/areaDetectorRX-Y
</pre>
</li>
<li>Download all required supporting modules if you don't already have them. This includes
asyn, autosave, busy, etc.</li>
<li>Edit the <tt>configure/RELEASE</tt> file and set the paths to your installation
of EPICS base and to your versions of supporting modules.</li>
<li>Run <tt>gnumake</tt> in the top level directory and check for any compilation
errors.</li>
</ol>
<h3>
Installation: prebuilt version</h3>
<p>Prebuilt versions of areaDetector are provide for Windows (win32-x86), Cygwin (cygwin-x86),
and Linux (linux-x86). Follow these steps to use the prebuilt version:</p>
<ol>
<li>Create an installation directory for the module. On Windows I typically use C:\EPICS\support.
On Linux I typically use /home/ACCOUNT/epics/support, where ACCOUNT is the name of the account
that is normally used to run the detector software, e.g. marccd on a marCCD detector, mar345 on
a mar345 detector, etc.</li>
<li>Place the distribution file in this directory. Then issue the commands (Unix style)
<pre>tar xvzf areaDetectorPrebuilt_RX-Y.tgz</pre>
</li>
<li>In the iocBoot directory make a <b>copy</b> of the example ioxXXX directory for the detector
you are using and give it a new local name. By doing this you will be able to update
to later versions of areaDetector without overwriting modifications you make in
the iocXXX directory.</li>
<li>In the new iocXXX directory you just created edit st.cmd to change the PV prefix
$(P) to one that is unique to your site. PV prefixes must be unique on the subnet,
and if you use the default prefix there could be a conflict with other detectors
of the same type. </li>
<li>In the same iocXXX directory edit the file envPaths to point to the locations
of all of the support modules on your system. Normally this is handled by the EPICS
build system, but when using the prebuilt version this must be manually edited.
Do not worry about the path to EPICS_BASE, it is not required.</li>
</ol>
<h3>
Installation: medm</h3>
<p>areaDetector provides display/control screens for the <a href="http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/extensions/medm/">medm</a>
Motif Editor and Display Manager. A prebuilt version of medm for Windows can be found in the
<a href="http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/distributions/win32/">EPICS WIN32 Extensions</a>. For Linux one can build medm
from source code, which requires downloading and building
<a href="http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/base/">EPICS base</a> first. Alternatively I provide a prebuilt version of
medm for Linux in the
<a href="http://cars.uchicago.edu/software/pub/EPICS_Linux_binaries.tar">EPICS_Linux_binraries.tar</a> package.
To use this version copy the medm executable to some location in your PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin, or ~/bin, etc.
Copy the 2 shareable libraries libCom.so and libca.so to a location which is in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
To use either the source code or prebuilt version you need to have the OpenMotif package installed. This
typically is <b>not</b> installed by default with recent versions of Linux. Go to
<a href="http://www.openmotif.org/">www.openmotif.org</a>
and download and install the appropriate RPM package for your Linux version.</p>
<h3>
Configuration</h3>
<p>Before running an areaDetector application it is usually necessary to configure a number of items.</p>
<ul>
<li>EPICS environment variables. There are several environment variables that EPICS uses. I suggest
setting these in the .cshrc (or .bashrc) file for the account that will be used to run the detector.
<ul>
<li>EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST and EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST. These variables control the IP addresses that EPICS
clients use when searching for EPICS PVs. The default is EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=YES
and EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST to be the broadcast address of all networks connected to the host.
Some detectors, for example the marCCD and mar345, come with 2 network cards, which are on 2 different
subnets, typically a private one connected to the detector and a public one connected to the local LAN.
If the default value of these variables is used then EPICS clients (e.g. medm) running on the detector
host computer will generate many errors because each EPICS PV will appear to be coming from both
networks. The solution is to set these variables as follows:
<pre>
setenv EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST NO
setenv EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST localhost:XX.YY.ZZ.255
</pre>
where XX.YY.ZZ.255 should be replaced with the broadcast address for the public network on this computer.</li>
<li>EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES. This variable controls the maximum array size that EPICS can transmit
with Channel Access. The default is only 16kB, which is much too small for most detector data. This value
must be set to a large enough value on both the EPICS server computer (e.g. the one running the
areaDetector IOC) and client computer (e.g. the one running medm, ImageJ, IDL, etc.). This can simply be set
to a very large value like 100MB.
<pre>
setenv EPICS_CA_MAX_ARRAY_BYTES 100000000
</pre>
</li>
<li>EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH. This variable controls where medm looks for .adl display files. If the recommendation
below is followed to copy all adl files to a single directory, then this environment variable should be defined
to point to that directory. For example:
<pre>
setenv EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH /home/mar345/epics/adls
</pre>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>medm display files. I find it convenient to copy all medm .adl files to a single directory and then point the
environment variable EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH to this directory. The alternative is to point EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH to a long
list of directories where the adl files are located in the distributions, which is harder to maintain.
On the mar345, for example,
I create a directory called /home/mar345/epics/adls, where I put all of the adl files. To simplify copying the adl files
to that location I use the following one-line script, which I place in /home/mar345/bin/sync_adls.
<pre>
find /home/mar345/epics/support -name '*.adl' -exec cp -fv {} /home/mar345/epics/adls \;
</pre>
This script finds all adl files in the epics/support tree and copies them to /home/mar345/epics/adls. That directory
must be created before running this script. Similar scripts can be used for other Linux detectors (marCCD, Pilatus, etc.)
and can be used on Windows as well if Cygwin is installed. Each time a new release of areaDetector is installed remove
the old versions of each support module (areaDetector, asyn, autosave, etc.) and then run this script to install the
latest medm files.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>
Running the IOC</h3>
<p>Each example IOC directory comes with a Linux script (start_epics) or a Windows batch file (start_epics.bat) or both
depending on the architectures that the detector runs on. These scripts provide simple examples of how to start
medm and the EPICS IOC. For example, for the mar345 iocBoot/iocMAR345/start_epics contains the following:</p>
<pre>
medm -x -macro "P=13MAR345_1:, R=cam1:, I=image1:, ROI=ROI1:, NETCDF=netCDF1:, TIFF=TIFF1:, JPEG=JPEG1:, NEXUS=Nexus1:" mar345.adl &amp;
../../bin/linux-x86/mar345App st.cmd
</pre>
<p>This script starts medm in execute mode with the appropriate medm display file and macro parameters, running it in the background. It then
runs the IOC application. This script assumes that iocBoot/iocMAR345 is the default directory when it is run, which could be added to the
command or set in the configuration if this script is set as the target of a desktop shortcut, etc. The script assumes that EPICS_DISPLAY_PATH
has been defined to be a location where the mar345.adl and related displays that it loads can be found. You will need to edit the script
in your copy of the iocXXX directory to change the prefix (P) from 13MAR345_1: to whatever prefix you chose for your IOC. The start_epics script
could also be copied to a location in your PATH (e.g. /home/mar345/bin/start_epics). Add a command like
<code>cd /home/mar345/epics/support/areaDetector/1-5/iocBoot/iocMAR345</code> at the beginning of the script and then type
<code>start_epics</code> from any directory to start the EPICS IOC.</p>
</body>
</html>