MClement

I just want to be clear....did you try the "ON" switch? ;-) Good luck sounds like a tough one!

and the response would be good to post here for others to learn from....

and IDE Tuning.....

I seem to recall an issue with the IDE not correctly finding ALL instances of C programs running. If you start two copies of the same program, it used to find the first one and that was it. It also did not correctly work to kill a C program. I cannot recall the exact behavior but it would not start the applications either, it would start a new copy of the C application. I have not revisited any of this in the latest IDE but the previous version had issues.

you don't have any motors listed on the left. If you set say I100=1 it may list a motor and then enable the step button???

its in the root directory of the pmac. When you login to the pmac with telnet or ssh and do a "ls" command you will see it listed there.

[we are using firmware 1.6.1.1 a and it doesn't work. I have changed the root password and I can login to the ide fine but it won't download or sync database because of some ftp error. I tried changing the ftp password and the hidden user "deltatau" to the new password but it still gives errors about the ftp server vsftpd.

Did anyone from Delta Tau ever advise whether you can use the full IDE if you disable the FTP account or service? I'm trying to secure my ppmac and that requires changing the root password and the ftp password. I seem to be able to browse the ftp server without even entering a password. If you just enter FTP as the username it logs in without ever asking for a password.

shansen Seems like sudo will give temporary root privilege which is the whole reason I wanted a non-root account in the first place? I want to be able to login and access say gpascii or maybe the IDE but not have access to the entire folder structure or select folders or PLCs etc. Do you know of a way to do this?

Or conversely, why don't the users who want to customize the prompt set up special user accounts to do so? You cannot create any accounts other than the existing root account and be able to talk to the power pmac. I tried setting up another account and without wrapping the entire gpascii there is no way to communicate to the Power pmac with an account other than the factory default root account. Try it! I agree with what's been said that the Power PMAC is a powerful motion controller that just happens to be running on an embedded Linux OS. I enjoy the openness that DT has provided with the control but clearly they can expand on that to give end users more "rope to hang themselves" or freedom, however you see it. ;-) Anything DT does to cripple the system is like giving someone a sports car and installing a throttle limiter. Not nearly as fun, but I will still take one!

Steve You are correct a Recovery Disk option for "Complete" gives all the /usrflash stuff as well as network, and kernel. It would be GREAT to also grab the fstab as none of the options except a full image will grab the filesystem which uses shares. This machine specific characteristic is akin to the network settings that need saved and the tool would be better than a script hack we are doing now.

It appears you can simply copy the /opt/ppmac/usrflash folder to the PPMAC and it will boot and use those as the saved PLCs. This then pushes them to the /var/ftp/usrflash folder which is where the actively running PLCS are stored. Encryption is not fully functional at the moment but the same should be true to copy the usrflash directory to transfer PLCs and Cprograms. This may be a viable way to deploy plcs. Also if you edit a plc and make changes, they take affect after a reboot however I have not determined how to add variables or definitions into the mix yet.

this is the error that I get. matt@192.168.0.220:/opt/ppmac$ gpascii Xenomai: binding failed: Operation not permitted. matt@192.168.0.220:/opt/ppmac$ I tried adding user matt to the deltatau group and it fails same.

I have created a new user on the Linux system and want to be able to use this account with gpascii. I did not assign the user account to any groups so it doesn't seem to have needed permissions to run gpascii. I get an error from the system. What groups do I need to join to have access to gpascii? My next step is to try joining the deltatau group. ps- I don't want this account to be root so that is not an option.

does this name come from a define that equals a number ie #define myplc1 1 or does the name have to be the same as the actual plc filename in the project? We are still having some difficulty getting it to work......any help would be appreciated.

We are currently looking to start running encryption on our system and one thing we are not sure of is how do we manage plc or c program updates in the field? How do we currently update a single plc or c app on the PPMAC in the field with and without encryption? Do we need to run the IDE to build the plcs every time we have an update? Is there a way (maybe communication library) that we can update a plc without having to use the IDE? Our fallback may have to be updating the entire system with the USB folder update option. Anyone else updating single plcs in the field?

Brad Thanks I will try that. I missed that in the manual ;-)

Did you ever get debugging to work reliably? Have you tried the latest rev of firmware/IDE? We are having similar issues where it doesn't work and maybe gives an error but the debugger starts so fast we cannot actually read the error if there are any. I do recall seeing something about unable to start once but restarting the debugger seemed to make that go away.

We were trying to use the IDE debugging to step through a PLC and either we are not doing it correctly (quite possible) or it just plain doesn't work at all. We have firmware v1.6.30 and the IDE is version 1.6.109 (we have not updated to the firmware/ide that came out yesterday) We build and download everything and then right click on the plc and select "debug selected plc" and it opens the debugger. We put breakpoints and it never hits any breakpoints. We use VS2013 for C# so we know how it's SUPPOSED to work and it just doesn't seem to work. Anyone else able to debug PLCs? Does debugging work for C programs with the IDE (don't want to resort to GDB on Linux).

Thanks Charles but we whipped something up to test those as well. We ended up not wanting to replace the PPMAC or the SDCard so we went back the share but added error trapping and self healing code to make it robust. The share will not need replaced over time so it really was the best option.

why do you say it will last longer? They both should be using flash and have wear leveling right?

When we check the dmesg log we see a ton of EtherCAT errors like below. I imagine something is not setup properly in the EtherCAT until much later in the boot sequence but not 100% sure. Any idea what could cause this or how to fix it?

it very well may be the best approach. We cringe at the idea of having to replace a customers SDcard every few years, but that's better than the flash on their ppmac.

I had not thought of the limited write issue. That brings up a good point that maybe writing to the share as we were doing IS the better way? We have seen issues when the share is not up that cause the write to fail and data loss. Maybe the answer is just to better error trap the share write. It's a shame because the data we want to save is only consumed by the ppmac and so made sense to move it to the ppmac for storage/updating. Wonder what DT's response is to saving data frequently on the ppmac and how they suggest doing it.

Can anyone explain what these two processes do? Specifically looking for what functionality is handled by each process. ppmacserver seems to be a .dll and .exe maybe for running something on windows system to talk to ppmac? I do see a process running on the PPMAC called ppmacserver which maybe listens for connections from the windows .exe?