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Alex Wallace Silke Nelson 

We want to gently remind everyone that anything ordered for integration or inclusion in the control system needs to be listed in the Supported Device List Supported Devices: Long Term Support. There is a process for adding new component to this list but there is no guarantee a component you order will be accepted and integrated. Furthermore, ordering an unlisted component before preliminary evaluation is strongly discouraged. If a nearly equivalent part already exists in the SDL, and there is not a very strong case and specific reason to use the new part number you ordered, then ECS will insist that you return the unlisted component and use a standard, already supported component. If a component is rejected or receives an unfavorable evaluation the same will apply. 

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PLC Continuous Integration Testing Pipeline

Alex Wallace 

New PLC operating system: TwinCAT BSD

This project kicked off with Jakob Sagatowski, the author of the world renowned All TwinCAT Blog, and leading expert in all things Beckhoff/TwinCAT in late March early April. We're very excited to be working with Jakob to advance our PLC workflows, making it easier to achieve a high degree of quality.

New PLC operating system: TwinCAT BSD

Ken Lauer Alex Wallace 

We started testing the new TwinCAT BSD operating system for the Beckhoff PLCs. This OS will replace our Windows Compact Embedded 7 PLC image which is standard on all PLCs. Eventually all of our PLCs will migrate to this new OS, and it will be glorious.

TC BSD is based on FreeBSD, a derivative of Unix, which makes it very similar to our typical linux operating environment. There are many enhancements we get from using TCBSD including:

• bash
• python
• Ansible management (remote management and provisioning of the PLC image)
• Package management for PLC and OS libraries
• Improved potential security
• TCBSD can be virtualized, leading to possibilities for CI pipelines
• Remote recovery of the realtime task, ie. the realtime task can crash terribly and we can still recover the PLC remotely
• etc.

Given the current focus on cybersecurity we expect to upgrade systems on an as needed basis to TCBSD. All new projects using PLCs are directed to use the new CX5240 with TCBSD as the OS.

LCLS-II HE

Margaret Ghaly 

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