Debugging update for vac system serial communications: we were able to successfully connect the smaller turbo pump to the Varian (manufacturer) software today by plugging the controller db9 directly into spica, and verified that the pump was able to send and receive information. Still no success on communication with the larger pump via python serial code, though. Issue potentially lies in the pinout mapping of the connectors, as the pinouts we'd been using work successfully for the small pump which only requires 3 connections (RXD, TXD, GND), but the large pump may require more. Tried to test this on the big pump by keeping the pinout setup for the small pump, and incrementally adding the remaining 6 connections on a one to one scale (Pin 1 matched to Pin 1, etc) between the controller DB9 and the field DB9 connected to the IOLAN ethernet cable. After each new connection was added, I retried running the serial connection code. None of the additional connections yielded any results, and the large pump remained unable to connect through the code. Next step is further looking into documentation on the pinouts to see if the large pump requires a different connection setup than the small pump.