CERN, Geneva
Hardware control systems are normally programmed using high-performance languages like C or C++ and increasingly also Java. All these languages are strongly typed and compiled which brings usually good performance but at the cost of a longer development and testing cycle and the need for more programming expertise. Dynamic languages which were long thought to be too slow or not powerful enough for control purposes are, thanks to modern powerful computers and advanced implementation techniques, fast enough for many of these tasks. We present examples from the LHCb Experiment Control System (ECS), which is based on a commercial SCADA software (PVSS II). We have successfully used Python to integrate hardware devices into the ECS. We present the necessary lightweight middle-ware we have developed, including examples for controlling hardware and software devices. We also discuss the development cycle, tools used and compare the effort to traditional solutions.
