Ian Nicholson

Thanks Steve! I'll see what I can come up with.

Turbo Clipper PWM-version servo loop tuning follows somewhat different rules than most True DAC PMACs, so a lot of the equations in the manuals and guides don't seem to cross over directly. For instance the Power PMAC Turbo I-Variable Equivalents 2014-01.pdf shows Equations for Servo Gains on page 10, but I can't use those directly, correct? If I'm converting from Turbo Clipper to CK3M, does DTO have equations for that use case? We're using the filtered-PWM version of the AX interface modules; do those follow different rules regarding Servo Gains than True DAC versions as well?

Steve, Even though I previously indiciated that this works as I hoped, the drawback to this seems to be that there are fairly easy ways to wipe out any previously fsaved variables. Right now I'm trying to track down a ConfigLoadErr and after that comes up it seems all my fsaved variables have been reset to 0 (this is at least the 2nd time). I'm assuming when the ConfigLoadErr occurs and it loads a blank project due to the error, when I save and reset to try to clear the error it saves the empty fsave variables. I'm not really sure what value fsave-ing during save-ing has. On Clipper (Turbo) I never saw that behavior; the FSAVE command in Turbo seemed to be completely separate from the SAVE command. If I want that independent persistent variable functionality that isn't affected by a save command, will I need to implement one of the user data-saving functions (from the App Notes mentioned elsewhere in these forums)? Or should I be able to achieve this with the existing fsave command somehow? I'm on FW 2.6.1.0 and IDE 4.5.2.9.

We support machines that have varying hardware, but otherwise operate mostly the same. In particular I'm thinking about servo motors/amplifiers (and even gear-drives with differing gear ratios). We've been supporting some of these machines for over 20 years, and others are only a couple years old or even newer. As products are phased out, we are forced to change to newer parts with different characteristics, and the software must adapt to this. We are now at the point where Turbo PMAC Clipper is not really available anymore, so we are working on moving over to CK3M. As some of the older machines have components fail, we must upgrade them with parts that are currently available. Also, as time passes we add capabilities to our machines; for instance our modern machine has an additional axis that the older machines do not have. The software needs to support What is the best way to dynamically assign/configure these motors depending on the machine type and component specs? When I add motors to the Project -> System -> Motors list, they are tied to specific hardware. If I want to use this project to control multiple machine types, I need those motors to be configured in PPMAC on the fly (my current plan is using fsaved variables to specify the current hardware configuration, and have the software assign motors based on those parameters). Can I delete the motors themselves and just set them up in code instead? For example my initialization PLC? With Turbo PMAC, we used the .CFG backup files to develop with and we kept separate a .CFG file for each machine type. Through the years we now have at least 30 different .CFG files for the different combinations of hardware, and if any fixes are made in these files, those fixes must be grafted into any other machine type .CFGs (we obviously only do this as needed since the workload would be massive to update all at once). I don't want to end up in this situation with PPMAC (esp. since PPMAC doesn't really have a single-file option) so I'm trying to develop a more universal approach so any machine type we retrofit with PPMAC can be run with the same software by setting a few config options.

It appears PPMAC originally did not support negative case constants in switch structures. However, the firmware update history for V2.5 Release Updates (August 2018) includes the following note: But when I try to use code such as the following, I get a Syntax Error on the minus sign: Has the IDE just not been updated to support this change yet? Is there a different syntax I should use here? Or am I misreading the history note and this is actually not supported?

Steve, I hope it's not too late for some clarification on this. Wouldn't your statement imply that any "fsave'd" variables get overwritten when a "save" command is issued? Or am I reading it wrong? In practice this doesn't seem to be the case. In our recently converted application I'm using "fsave" to save calibration values for our machines whenever they need to be modified. When downloading our project I issue "$$$***", download, then "save" and "$$$" to get everything initialized properly. In the one machine I've got converted this doesn't seem to overwrite the variables specified in my "pp_custom_save.tpl", and a PLC program performs "fload" and everything seems to work great. But after reading your statement a few times I'm concerned that I've missed something. I suppose the root question is, do "fsave'd" variables survive a full reset and re-download? (which is how Turbo PMAC "FSAVE" worked)

Thanks, Steve! This aligns with what I mostly understood.

This is going to get a little long in the tooth, my apologies... I have converted Turbo PMAC (Clipper) software to Power PMAC for use with CK3M as I've been told Clippers are very hard to get anymore. Traditionally we used the Restore menu option in PEWIN32Pro to load a single .CFG file we update (there are actually several files for different machine variations we sell). We never did get into include-files, so everything is self contained in a single .CFG. As you can probably imagine, this makes quick edits/variable updates quite easy for non-experts to accomplish. As we are moving toward using Power PMAC in our machines, I'm wondering about best practices for managing the Power PMAC IDE project. Before, we never really had separate concepts of "source" and "backup"; everything was self-contained within the .CFG. With Power PMAC we're obviously expected to maintain separate source code. This could be great for source-code-control (git, for instance), but means anyone who wants to make changes to our software would need to install and understand the IDE rather than Notepad or the simple text editor within PEWIN32Pro. Here are a couple questions I have: What is the best way to save this source code, in a way that others could make small changes quickly and download them to a machine? For my initial development I'm just ZIPping the entire project folder, which would have to be dumped onto any machines where the software needs a tweak (right?). This means those machines would need a complete install of the IDE, correct? If I start managing this project with git for example, my colleagues would either have to manually unZIP the project on any machines where they need to make a change, or would have to set up and understand git on their laptop, and would have to connect said laptop to the Power PMAC in order to download the updated changes. Are these really the only two options? I've discovered the Backup/Restore functions in the IDE. It seems like the .TAR files the backup functions generate can substitute for the .CFG backup file paradigm on Turbo PMAC. Is this a logical way to think of this? The IDE is a huge download! What options are there to avoid having to download it on every machine? Is it difficult to write a .TAR restore function in other languages? We use LabVIEW for our HMI/UI, so I could probably translate an example over to LabVIEW. That's all I can remember off the top of my head. Thanks in advance!