This page describes how to set and get control system values via rudimentary AIDA command line tools. These are available on LCLS production nodes without setup, and on SLAC public machines after going through the basic setup described in Basic User Guide to Aida. These are available on LCLS production nodes without setup, and on SLAC public machines after going through the basic setup described in Basic User Guide to Aida.
Fetching Values: aidaget
The utility program named "aidaget" takes one mandatory argument (the name of the target), and several optional parameters control how it works. You can specify "-help" as a parameter to see simple options. Some of the more interesting options are specific to each data-provider, which may support optional or require mandatory paramters.
The following example retrieves history data. It illustrates how you can specify data provider parameters (in this case STARTTIME and ENDTIME) and control output format (-format=columns -labels):
aidaget HR81:CAV2:VACM//HIST.pepii -format=columns -labels \
-DSTARTTIME="02/01/2003 12:20:00" -DENDTIME="02/01/2003 12:40:00"
d s repCnt_l unixtime
1.93979E-9 01-Feb-2003 12:20:00 1 1044130800
1.9181E-9 01-Feb-2003 12:20:55 0 1044130855
1.9181E-9 01-Feb-2003 12:21:00 1 1044130860
1.928914E-9 01-Feb-2003 12:21:18 0 1044130878
1.928914E-9 01-Feb-2003 12:24:00 3 1044131040
As you can see, data provider parameters are specified as -Dname1=value1 -Dname2=value2. Note the need to enclose embedded whitespace within " marks to prevent the shell from treating it as a boundary between strings. The output format may be specified as "columns" or "rows". The only difference is that one is a transpose of the other. The option "-labels" indicates that the columns (or rows) should be named. Not all data providers supply these names, in which case you'll need to consult their documentation to interpret the column numbers.
Here's a simple example that retrieves an EPICS process variable, displaying in rows format.
aidaget HR81:STN:VOLT//VAL -labels -format=rows time 06-Nov-2006 10:30:05 status 0 severity 0 value 0.22782705806669729
Getting BPM data:
aidaget P2BPMHER//BPMS -DBPMD=38 -DREF=0 BPMS:PR10:6012 0.0 0.0 3128.0562 0.0 17 520 BPMS:PR10:6022 0.0 0.0 3135.6562 0.0 17 520 BPMS:PR10:6032 0.0 0.0 3143.256 0.0 17 520 ...
Getting Magnets:
aidaget LINAC//XCOR:BDES -DMICROS=LI10-LI10 -DUNITS=1-9999 XCOR:LI10:200 0.0 XCOR:LI10:201 0.0 XCOR:LI10:202 0.0 ...
Setting Value: aidaset
The utility program named "aidaset" takes at least two mandatory arguments (the name of the target and the desired value), and several optional parameters control how it operates.
An AIDA data provider that supports setting values will accept either a single scalar or vector value, or a list of named scalar or vector values. The EPICS channel access data provider is of the former sort, and the SLC Magnet server is of the latter.
NB: Presently, only the EPICS Channel Access and SLC Magnet data providers support write operations.
An example of setting a scalar EPICS process variable:
aidaset HR81:STN:VOLT//VAL 0.227
And an example of setting a corrector via the Magnet server:
aidaset MAGNETSET//BDES -DMAGFUNC=TRIM /names XCOR:LI31:41 /values 4.0
In the EPICS channel access example, we sent a single unnamed value. In the magnet example, we sent a named value. As you can see, the magent server expects two vectors, one listing magnet names and the other listing the corresponding desired values. Unless the data provider documentation indicates otherwise, the names of the vectors are not important. The following is equivalent to the above example:
aidaset MAGNETSET//BDES -DMAGFUNC=TRIM /sun XCOR:LI31:41 /moon 4.0
Vector elements my be listed sequentially with whitespace separators as in the following example that sets several magnets simultaneously:
aidaset MAGNETSET//BDES -DMAGFUNC=TRIM /names XCOR:LI10:200 XCOR:LI10:201 /values 0.0123 -0.0321