Several USC graduate students have already done a lot of work on the EPICS Slow Control system of the CLAS (CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer) detector. A lot of effort and work was required in setting up hardware and writing software before physically significant data was extracted.
The University of South Carolina effort in the Slow Controls system of Hall B has been previously carried out by Marc Winoc Swynghedauw [17], Thierry Auger [7] and Sebastien Fabbro [10]. These USC graduate student did mainly help develop the Slow Control system for High Voltage.
Once the High Voltage control system was functional, the Slow Control system for the Hall B beam line had to be completed. There were a lot of beamline devices that had to be instrumented checked and made ready for the different test runs of the end of 1996 and 1997.
So there was a great amount of work to do, and solutions to find for the many problems that we would have to face on every new device instrumentation. There were hardwares to build and to install in the Hall, power and logic connections to establish, and softwares to write to control all that equipment.
I gave my own contribution to this effort, mainly in software development, even if I also spent some time running cables and soldering wires on electronic boards.
Most of the present thesis won't be of much use for anybody, especially the parts that present CLAS (Chapter 2 and EPICS (Chapter 3). Many better documents can be found (see [10] for references). On the other hand, the Chapter 4, intended to be part of an everyday documentation for the people on shift, and that also contains some information on the design of the program, will be useful for uses and programmers. Also Chapter 5 will be of some use for referencing the beam quality in the Hall during the first commissioning runs. So, I don't lose complete hope, and I believe that this work might be read once or twice.