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AreaDetector Driver for Cameralink PCO Cameras

##PCO Driver

This driver is for PCO cameras. Though PCO cameras have generally the same software interface, this driver is intended for Cameralink-based Dimax and Edge cameras. It should work for any PCO Cameralink camera however.

The PCO driver depends on ADCameralink for support of the camera link frame grabbers. To get ADPCO to build, the ADCameralink driver must be successfully built first. Please see the Readme.md in ADCameralink. Because ADCameralink can support multiple commercial grabbers, and depends on commercial software libraries, there are several steps to building ADCameralink. ADCameralink hides most grabber-specific issues from the ADPCO driver. The PCO driver and ADCameralink can build on Windows 32 or 64 bit. The iocBoot directory is configured for 64 bit, as that is the most used platform. Also, the driver builds in Linux. However, the Linux version is not well tested, and Silicon Softwarwe does not specify exactly which Linux distros are supported.

###To build ADPCO

  1. Configure and build ADCameralink.
  2. Build ADPCO.

ADPCO must build an application library in pcoApp, and also the IOC in iocs. In building the iocs, the proper commercial library from the grabber must be linked. See the Makefile in iocs/pcoIOC/pcoApp/src.

Though ADCameralink supports multiple frame grabbers, PCO requires silocon Software because there are special firmwares in the grabber the PCO Edge needs. Dimax can run with either Silicon software or Dalsa.

##Plugin for Edge camera

The PCO Edge camera sends scrambled images that need to be descrambled. This plugin handles this. If the camera runs faster than the plugin, then images will be stored in the NDArray queues.

To configure the driver for your system:

  1. In the iocBoot/iocPCO directory, find envPaths64.

  2. Edit these lines at the top of the file.

    epicsEnvSet("AREA_DETECTOR","C:/EPICS/GitHub/areaDetector-R2-4")
epicsEnvSet("EPICS_BASE","C:/EPICS/ADepics/baseR12.1")
epicsEnvSet("SUPPORT","C:/EPICS/ADepics/SynApps_5_5/support")
epicsEnvSet("REQPATH","C:/EPICS/ADEpics/iocs")

  3. Also, you may have to alter lines further down in envPaths64 so the synApps versions match. ADPCO uses all the standard versions of synApps modules.

  4. In the ADPCO/iocs/pcoIOC/iocBoot/iocPCO directory, edit edgeGlobShutter.mcf. There is a line that has path to PCO_scmos_gl_x64.hap. Edit that line so the FULL path is there, starting from the drive name. The PCO silicon Software driver cannot deal with relative paths.

  5. Edit STARTEDGE or STARTDIMAX to set the PATHs correctly. The same software runs Edge and Dimax, but the startup files differ.