Now that the Acromag upgrade of c1vac is complete, the next system to be upgraded will be c1susaux. We chose c1susaux because it is one of the highest-priority systems awaiting upgrade, and because Johannes has already partially assembled its Acromag replacement (see photos below). I've assessed the partially-assembled Acromag chassis and the mostly-set-up host computer and propose we do the following to complete the system.

Documentation

As I go, I'm writing step-by-step documentation here so that others can follow this procedure for future systems. The goal is to create a standard procedure that can be followed for all the remaining upgrades.

Acromag Chassis Status

The bulk of the remaining work is the wiring and testing of the rackmount chassis housing the Acromag units. This system consists of 17 units: 10 ADCs, 4 DACs, and 3 digitial I/O modules. Johannes has already created a full list of channel wiring assignments. He has installed DB37-to-breakout board feedthroughs for all the signal cable connections. It looks like about 40% of the wiring from the breakout boards to Acromag terminals is already done.

The Acromag units have to be initially configured using the Windows laptop connected by USB. Last week I wasn't immediately able to check their configuration because I couldn't power on the units. Although the DC power wiring is complete, when I connected a 24V power supply to the chassis connector and flipped on the switch, the voltage dropped to ~10V irrespective of adjusting the current limit. The 24V indicator lights on the chassis front and back illuminated dimly, but the Acromag lights did not turn on. I suspect there is a short to ground somewhere, but I didn't have time to investigate further. I'll check again this week unless someone else looks at it first.

Host Computer Status

The host computer has already been mostly configured by Johannes. So far I've only set up IP forwarding rules between the martian-facing and Acromag-facing ethernet interfaces (the Acromags are on a subnet inaccessible from the outside). This is documented in the link above. I also plan to set up local installations of modbus and EPICS, as explained below. The new EPICS command file (launches the IOC) and database files (define the channels) have already been created by Johannes. I think all that remains is to set up the IOC as a persistent system service.

Host computer OS

Recommendation from Keith Thorne:

For CDS lab-wide, Jamie Rollins and Ryan Blair have been maintaining Debian 8 and 9 repos with some of these.  
They have somewhat older EPICS versions and may not include all the modules we have for SL7.
One worry is whether they will keep up Debian 9 maintained, as Debian 10 is already out.

I would likely choose Debian 9 instead of Ubuntu 18.04.02, as not sure of Ubuntu repos for EPICS libraries.

Based on this, I propose we use Debian 9 for our Acromag systems. I don't see a strong reason to switch to SL7, especially since c1vac and c1susaux are already set-up using Debian 8. Although Debian 8 is one version out of date, I think it's better to get a well-documented and tested procedure in place before we upgrade the working c1vac and c1susaux computers. When we start building the next system, let's install Debian 9 (or 10, if it's available), get it working with EPICS/modbus, then loop back to c1vac and c1susaux for the OS upgrade.

Local vs. central modbus/EPICS installation

The current convention is for all machines to share a common installation which is hosted on the /cvs/cds network drive. This seems appealing because only a single central EPICS distribution needs to be maintained. However, from experience attempting this on c1vac, I'm convinced this is a bad design for the new Acromag systems.

The problem is that any network outage, even routine maintenance or brief glitches, wreaks havoc on Acromags set up this way. When the network is interrupted, the modbus executable disappears mid-execution, crashing the process and hanging the OS (I think related to the deadlocked NFS mount), so that the only way to recover is to manually power-cycle. Still worse, this can happen silently (channel values freeze), meaning that, e.g., watchdog protections might fail.

To avoid this, I'm planning to install a local EPICS distribution from source on c1susaux, just as I did for c1vac. This only takes a few minutes to do, and I will include the steps in the documented procedure. Building from source also better protects against OS-dependent buginess.

Main TODO items

• Debug issue with Acromag DC power wiring
• Complete wiring from chassis feedthroughs to Acromag terminals, following this wiring diagram
• Check/set the configuration of each Acromag unit using the software on the Windows laptop
• Set the analog channel calibrations in the EPICS database file
• Test each channel ex situ. Chub and I discussed an idea to use two DB-37F breakout boards, with the wiring between the board terminals manually set. One DAC channel would be calibrated and driven to test other ADC channels. A similar approach could be used for the digital input/output channels.