Installation and Getting Started

The latest version of the epicsapps package is 0.9.2+18.g0cc3d85.dirty, which can be installed with:

pip install epicsapps

Many Epics Applications are available as GUI Applications, using wxPython. For Windows and macOS X, all dependencies can be reliably installed with either pip and the PyPI packaging system or using Anaconda Python and conda and the conda-forge channel.

PyPI does not currently have a binary package for wxPython for Linux, and wxPython is somewhat challenging to automatically build from source on Linux. There are conda packages for wxPython, especially from the conda-forge channel.

Using Anaconda Python is recommended and likely to be in used for many folks using Epics anyway. In that case, you can first do:

conda install -c conda-forge wxpython

and then do:

pip install epicsapps

This approach will work on all systems, and is recommended on Linux.

Getting Started

Installing the epicsapps package will install a command-line script epicsapps that can be used to launch the main epicsapps GUI applications. This works as:

epicsapps [options] appname  [filename]

where options can be

• -h, –help: show this help message and exit

• -m, –makeicons create desktop and start menu icons

• -p, –prompt prompt for configuration on startup

• -n, –no-prompt suppress prompt, use default configuration

and appname can be one of

• adviewer [filename] Area Detector Viewer

• instruments [filename] Epics Instruments

• microscope [filename] Sample Microscope Viewer

• stripchart Epics PV Stripchart

and filename is an optional configuration YAML file.

Note that running:

epicsapps -m

will create a folder called “Epics Apps” on your desktop with links to launch the main GUI applications.