Adapters#

Adapters are user implemented classes associated with a device which facilitate interactions between that device and components external to the simulation. Adapters allow us to influence the device from outside the simulation, such as using a TCP client to alter a parameter on a device. A device may have multiple adapters simultaneously.

Adapters are implemented within AdapterContainer and these containers are added to the device or system simulations. An AdapterContainer simply takes an adapter and an appropriate AdapterIo. When the container is run, it sets up the io with the specific adapter.

  • The Adapter contains the device specific interface for a given io type.

  • The AdapterIo contains IO logic which is agnositc to the details of the device.

There are four adapter types included in the framework:

  1. Command adapter

  2. ZMQ adapter

  3. HTTP adapter

  4. EPICS adapter

Command adapter#

The command adapter identifies and handles commands from incoming messages and is utilised with TcpIo. Commands are defined via decoration of adapter methods and the only such command type currently is a RegexCommand. This matches incoming messages to regex patterns and processes the command appropriately.

ZMQ adapter#

An adapter for use on a ZeroMQ data stream.

HTTP adapter#

An adapter that utilises HTTP endpoints for the HttpIo.

EPICS adapter#

An adapter implementation that acts as an EPICS IOC. It utilises pythonSoftIOC create an IOC in the process which hosts PVs which can be linked to attributes on the device.

This is useful for the simulation of devices which use hard IOCs since these cannot interact with simulated devices.