  With the advent of readily available wireless communications and small
hand-held computers, commonly known as personal digital assistants (PDAs), it
is interesting to consider using these portable devices to access a control
system. We have successfully ported the Experimental Physics and Industrial
Control System (EPICS) to Windows CE 3.0 (WCE) for the Pocket PC (PPC), and
this paper describes the issues involved. The PPC was chosen because the WCE
application programming interface (API) for the PPC is a subset of the Win32
API, which EPICS already supports, and because PPC devices tend to have more
memory than other PDAs. PDAs provide several ways to connect to a network,
using wired or wireless Compact Flash or PCMCIA Ethernet cards and modems. It
is the recent advent of readily available wireless networks that makes using
the portable PDA interesting. The status and issues surrounding the various
kinds of wireless systems available are presented.
