New Control System for the SPES Off-line Laboratory at LNL-INFN using EPICS IOCs based on the Raspberry Pi

SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) is an ISOL type RIB facility of the LNL-INFN at Italy dedicated to the production of neutron-rich radioactive nuclei by uranium fission. At the LNL, for the last four years, an off-line laboratory has been developed in order to study the target front-end test bench. The instrumentation devices are controlled using EPICS. A new flexible, easy to adapt, low cost and open solution for this control system is being tested. It consists on EPICS IOCs developed at the LNL which are based on the low cost computer board Raspberry Pi with custom-made expansion boards. The operating system is a modify version of Debian Linux running EPICS soft IOCs that communicates with the expansion board using home-made drivers. The expansion boards consist on multi-channel 16bits ADCs and DACs, digital inputs and outputs and stepper motor drivers. The idea is to have a distributed control system using customized IOC for controlling the instrumentation devices on the system as well as to read the information from the detectors using the EPICS channel access as communication protocol. This solution will be very cost effective and easy to customize.