Monitoring and Safety

[MerlinSmiles]

Apart from the ability to do a small experiment we do need monitoring and related to that, safety systems.

Some information should be monitored all the time, and potentially automatically be added to a given experiment, i.e. Fridge temperature

As an example, We are running these fridges, I want an service running in the background and ask the fridge for its information every second, or five.

That service should at the same time allow the experiment to talk to the fridge.

In this case the monitor should be there for something like this:

• Log the temperature.
  • There is no reason to ask for the fridge temperature 100 times a second during a measurement, but the data could be saved with timestamps that allows to correlate the data.
  • Or the measurement asks the service about the latest temperature without interrupting the fridge.

• Other Instruments, in the case here the Magnet should monitor this service as well.

  • I certainly want to comply to safety measures, to enforce magnet use only at certain conditions. There should be global flags that the magnet cheks to know if it is allowed to ramp the field.
  • I also want to handle events, The safety monitor should even abort an experiment and keep the system save.

  Temperature > xK: Ramp to zero,

  Temperature also > yK: Ramp to zero with this slow/fast rate

  Time == 8PM: order pizza

• Monitor the status of the electricity grid, this building here is really bad in terms of grid stability
• Notify me on the events I specify

I can think of all kinds of ways to extend this :) But there is at least one crucial basic features that we need - safety.

[MerlinSmiles]

I actually also want to be able to subsribe to some status data from a different computer too.

I think this should be based on some kind of broadcasting mechanism, like ZMQ If this works well, the cooling water supply machine could just broadcast that something fishy and stuff like that...

[giulioungaretti]

see fex. #590 .