In June, 2014 Galil announced its EPICS Baseline support. EPICS is an acronym which stands for Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System. It is an open source, distributed software framework used extensively in “Big Physics” projects such as particle accelerators, telescopes, and other large-scale experimental installations. Using EPICS, scientists are able to network together arbitrarily complex systems of nodes, such as Motion Controllers, PLCs, instrumentation, and other software and hardware agents. Using a read/write protocol called Channel Access, the nodes, called Input/Output controllers (IOCs), can communicate while providing high-level functionality and interaction.

    Working closely with engineers from the Australian Synchrotron, Galil defined a general-purpose EPICS driver for Galil motion controllers and PLCS. This driver provides basic motor record support as well as access to the embedded program memory and arrays. This allows any Galil hardware to be inserted into an EPICS network without requiring a deep knowledge of EPICS IOC development.

Since the release of Galil's EPICS Baseline fork, the original project has continued to grow.

Major improvements include:
1. Best-practices, ASYN-based model for communications.
2. Example MEDM displays, as well as updated QT-based displays with the QE framework.
3. PLC support for Analog and Digital I/O control with Galil's RIO family.
4. Enhanced Motor Record.
5. Motion Coordination.
6. Data record mapping using a portion of Galil's new gclib library.

The new EPICS driver can be found HERE.
Galil's Epics Baseline can be found HERE.