Migrating to an EPICS Based Instrument Control System at the ISIS Spallation Neutron Source

The beamline instruments at the ISIS spallation neutron source [1] have been running successfully for many years using an in-house developed control system. The advent of new instruments and the desire for more complex experiments has led to a project being created to determine how best to meet these challenges. Though it would be possible to enhance the existing system, migrating to an EPICS-based [2] system offers many advantages in terms of flexibility, software reuse and the potential for collaboration. While EPICS is well established for accelerator and synchrotron beamline control, is it not currently widely used for neutron instruments, but this is changing. The new control system is being initially developed to run in parallel with the existing system, a first version being scheduled for testing on two newly constructed instruments starting summer 2013. In this paper, we will discuss the design and implementation of the new control system, including how our existing National Instruments LabVIEW controlled equipment was integrated, and issues that we encountered during the migration process.