Pressure Controller

Overview

A PressureController monitors and optionally controls a pressure by means of a PID loop, and may also operate a gate valve. The interface is single-channel and assumes a single pressure sensor and an optional single valve.

Settings

Most settings are exposed in the hardware dialog with inline labels and tooltips supplied by the settings registry. A few items are worth highlighting:

  • min and max set the display range for the pressure readout and the bounds enforced by the setpoint spin box; decimal controls the number of decimal places.

  • units (Pressure Units) is registered as an Important setting because it must match the unit system reported by the device. The base-class default is Torr.

  • readInterval is the polling period in milliseconds. Faster intervals smooth the rolling-data trace at the cost of more serial traffic.

  • hasValve controls whether the dialog and gas-control widget expose explicit open/close gate-valve actions. Read-only monitor configurations should leave this off.

Pressure values are reported as both rolling data and auxiliary data, so the channel can be used as a validation setting to terminate an acquisition that drifts outside an acceptable window.

Drivers

Virtual

A dummy driver that returns a pressure equal to the setpoint. Useful for offline UI testing.

Intellisys IQplus

The Intellisys IQplus is an adaptive pressure controller that combines a pressure sensor, PID loop, and pendulum valve to regulate the pressure in a process chamber. The communication protocol is RS232. The driver overrides the base-class default for min to 0.0 to match the device’s downstream-control range.