Power PMAC project best practices for Turbo PMAC user

[Ian Nicholson]

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:

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. 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!

[steve.milici]

Changes to any PMAC requires the IDE and the project on the PC. You can only download to PMAC with the IDE unless you make your own HMI with the Power PMAC Development Kit (PDK) – this is not a trivial endeavor. I would recommend keeping the “working copy” of your project in a zip-file to use at the PMAC site.

 

For a backup of the PMAC, the main “Backup” menu to a “.tar” file is the recommended choice to save on the local PC. The “Recovery Disk” is a good choice to create a USB stick for a power-on restore of the PMAC at any site.

 

See the IDE manual for implementation details of these options in the section “Backup Restore”.

 

[Ian Nicholson]

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