Overview

Caproto now provides preliminary pvAccess support.

In addition to its core “sans I/O” protocol library, caproto-pva includes a ready-to-use synchronous client and an asyncio-based server implementations.

How preliminary are we talking?

To put that statement into context, caproto itself was originally developed as a fun side project between 3 developers and refined over the course of the past few years.

The internals of caproto’s pvAccess support, on the other hand, were developed as a solo side-project with zero testing from (or discussion with) others, over the course of a few months’ weekends. Given the relative complexity of pvAccess over Channel Access, caproto’s pvAccess support cannot compete with the level of its Channel Access support.

Please don’t be too discouraged by the above:

  • The basics of what’s needed to support PVAccess are already done.

  • Like caproto for Channel Access, caproto-pva is one of the easier ways to go from zero-to-IOC without only a single requirement: Python itself.

  • Contributing time to help testing or provide input would be greatly appreciated.

Try caproto-pva in four lines

First verify that you have Python 3.7+.

python3 --version

If necessary, install it by your method of choice (apt, Homebrew, conda, etc.). Now install caproto:

python3 -m pip install -U caproto

In one terminal, start an EPICS Input-Output Controller (IOC), which is a server.

python3 -m caproto.pva.ioc_examples.normative --list-pvs

In another, use the command-line client:

python3 -m caproto.pva.commandline.put caproto:pva:int 42

This sets the value to 42.