EPICS IOC for the PicoQuant HydraHarp 400

The HydraHarp 400 is advertized as a "multichannel picosecond event timer module" by its manufacturer, PicoQuant GmbH in Germany.

This is an EPICS Input-Output Controller (IOC) application for the HydraHarp. It uses the EMMI API, which in turn uses Diamond Light Source's EPICS wrapper pythonSoftIOC (as of September 2023). This means that miniquant-ioc's EPICS CA stack is essentially the "original" C/C++ implementation, merely interfaced by Python.

The hardware access layer is being published as miniquant -- a truly Python'esque :) API layer on top of the proprietary HydraHarp API of PicoQuant, but without the EPICS specific code.

Installation

Miniquant-ioc itself is installed fairly easy via PyPI:

pip install miniquant-ioc

Or via direct clone from Gitlab:

git clone https://gitlab.com/codedump2/miniquant-ioc \
    && pip install ./miniquant-ioc

If miniquant (the API layer) is not already installed, it will be automatically pulled from PyPI as a dependency of miniquant-ioc. In that case, you will most certainly have to go through a mildly elaborate set of post-install procedures to make sure that miniquant is, in fact, able to find and access your HydraHarp. (This is owing for one to the proprietary nature of the original PicoQuant C/C++ API for the HydraHarp, and for another to the fact that the HydraHarp 400 has a quirky USB controller; it works with any modern upstream Linux kernel, but requires specialized kernel boot parameter or USB driver module settings.)

Running

Adapting the Configuration