An Extensible Equipment Control Library for Hardware Interfacing in the Fair Control System

In the FAIR control system the SCU (Scalable Control Unit, an industry PC with a bus system for interfacing electronics) is the standard front-end controller for power supplies. The FESA-framework is used to implement front-end software in a standardized way, to give the user a unified look on the installed equipment. As we were dealing with different power converters and thus with different SCU slave card configurations, we had two main things in mind: First, we wanted to be able to use common FESA classes for different types of power supplies, regardless of how they are operated or which interfacing hardware they use. Second, code dealing with the equipment specifics should not be buried in the FESA-classes but instead be reusable for the implementation of other programs. To achieve this we built up a set of libraries which interface the whole SCU functionality as well as the different types of power supplies in the field. Thus it is now possible to easily integrate new power converters and the SCU slave cards controlling them in the existing equipment software and to build up test programs quickly.