Phar Lap ETS ..... ANTIL Robot

[a-boss]

Hello, can anyone help me or tell me about the ANTIL robot. i think it works for REAL TIME SYSTEM. Recently there was a malfunction and the files on the CF card are corrupted. I formatted this CF card and wrote an image on it from another CF card of the same robot. It does not help. the system does not boot and the message remains on the screen: "Phar Lap ETS Monitor ....." I tried different programs (Acronis, Hexeditor and other similar ones), the result is the same. What am I doing wrong ?

[rolfk]

You have probably come to the wrong board for this. While NI did use Pharlap ETS for their old LabVIEW realtime hardware, your ANTIL robot seems to be a distinctive product that uses Pharlap ETS for its operating system but has little to do with LabVIEW. We can not help with support for this product, NI can't either as they didn't design it, nor could Interval Zero, who is the owner of Pharlap ETS.

The person you have to contact here is your ANTIL representative. They are the only ones who know how their robots are built and how to get them working again in case of a failure like this.

Also note that Pharlap ETS is officially EOL (end of life) since about 2011/2012.

[a-boss]

Thanks for the quick response !

I'm sorry, I already realized that I wrote in the wrong board.

Unfortunately, the manufacturer has not responded for a long time. we have the same working robot and I am trying to use it to restore data on another CF card by cloning, but this does not work,

I can not understand why, if there may be some feature in the boot sector of the CF card that is not cloned,

or for example binding to the hardware.

maybe you can tell where can you read about it?

thanks in advance.

With best Regard Andrey

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

There is very little information online about Pharlap ETS. It used to be a highly customizable real-time system if one bought the source code license (which is far beyond what normal users ever would consider). So whoever used that to integrate in their hardware has lots and lots of options. The problem is that the documentation what you can do and how, is basically only contained in the according Software Development Kit that you could buy from Pharlap too. There is pretty much nothing legitime to be found on the Internet (and I'm not willing to download obscure packages from even more obscure download sites that seldom contain what the package claims to be about).

There is certainly a possibility to built in some hardware identification in a Pharlap boot media so that you can't just clone it from a different machine. If and how that is done is only known to the manufacturer. So unless you can get ANTIL (or an authorized maintenance company) to give you support, there is a good chance that this robot is now pretty much only a heap of chunk.

Interval Zero only sells runtime licenses to existing customers for Pharlap ETS. The development system and source code is not available anymore as they do not want anyone to use this for new systems. Instead they want new customers to buy their other real-time system they have as a product, and that is a fair requirement. Pharlap ETS is a rather old system that was not easily portable to newer hardware such as ARM chips, which are nowadays the big hype for any sort of embedded hardware control.