The Spring 2025 EPICS Collaboration Meeting took place this April at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). Directors Alan Greer and Andy Foster attended, along with three members of the Observatory Sciences Ltd (OSL) Oxford office: Ulrik Pedersen, Phil Smith, and Bryn Roberts. OSL’s Oxford office is based at RAL and the meeting was attended by members of scientific institutions from RAL and across the world that use EPICS.
The first three days of the meeting consisted of a range of talks on EPICS topics, including facility status updates, and developments in EPICS tools such as Bluesky and oac-tree. OSL’s Phil Smith gave a presentation on OmronEIP, an EPICS driver he developed for the STFC to interface with Omron PLCs. This talk sparked conversations with various developers expressing interest in using the driver. EPICS is an open source project and a consistent theme throughout the conference was people sharing the tools they had written and the importance of collaboration.
On Wednesday evening the conference dinner was held at St Hilda’s College in Oxford. This was a lovely meal with a talk on the history of EPICS tracing its origins in Los Alamos in 1988 through to the present day. The final two days of the conference were dedicated to tutorials and workshops exploring the latest EPICS tools and features. This provided an opportunity to ensure we are familiar with and ready to use these tools.
Beyond the formally timetabled talks and tutorials an important part of the week were the many informal discussions with EPICS collaborators. These allowed us to better understand how EPICS is currently being used and will be going forward.
