Now that we have built a nice TANGO device server in the previous part of this tutorial we finally want to use it.

After installing TANGO from the sources or binaries provided on www.tango-controls.org and running the TANGO database device server you need to register your device with the database to use it fully. There is however a nodb-mode if you absolutely cannot communicate with the the database device due to networking restrictions. We assume normal operation with a database accessible for the following stuff.

Registering a device server at a TANGO database

The database to use is specified by the environment variable TANGO_HOST. So first you run the tool jive and run the Server Wizard from the Tools menu:

The server name equals the executable name for C++ device servers but can be set by the programmer for Python and Java device servers. We use time_device_server for our tutorial. The instance name may be chosen quite freely – lets call our server instance localtime. In the next step we have to start the server with the same TANGO_HOST and the instance name as parameter. That way you can register and run the same server multiple times on the same or even different machines and distinguish the them. Then you have to declare the device classes and name the device instances of this server:

The device name is a three part identifier which is used to communicate with the device. In our example we use the first part to differentiate between real/hardware devices and virtual/logical devices implemented completely in software. It also could be used for the different departments in your institution for example. It is up to you to fill the identifier with meaningful information.

At the end of the wizard the device server is reinitialised and ready to use. Now we can use Jive to find our device:

Our device implementation is very basic so it provides only the meaningless state information of UNKNOWN but also our read-only attribute providing us with the current machine time in ISO format. AtkPanel polls all attributes of our devices and gives us a generic overview of the actual device state. Writable attributes can be changed through AtkPanel or with Test device from the Jive context menu (bottom window of the screenshot above). Feel free to experiment a bit with both tools.

In the next post we will improve our device server and add configuration via device properties.