Talking to Hardware/Devices

[Robatronic]

There are existing drivers for talking to devices in EPICS. Can I use those in PythonIOC? Or is communicating with hardware (such as PLCs) something that needs to be built?

[coretl]

There are two answers to this:

1. If the device support is already written in Python (like https://github.com/PandABlocks/PandABlocks-client) then an IOC can be made using it. There is still a reasonable amount of work to be done (mapping each Device command to a relevant record and on_update method)
2. If there is already EPICS support, it would have to be compiled against the exact same version of epics base that pythonSoftIOC uses, and then loaded. This is tricky to arrange, and is discussed in Would be nice to separate out devIocStats #6. At the moment, only devIocStats is compiled into pythonSoftIOC, and I would be reluctant to add anything else without a clear roadmap of where we're going with that. I would suggest it is better to manage existing EPICS support by making a traditional EPICS IOC, then adding any python logic as a separate IOC on top.