Replication and Deployment Utility (RAD)

[LUX_]

Hi,

Is anyone know the RTAD automatically deploys network shared variables? I have a project that works fine if I deploy with the project. But when I use RTAD to retrive image, then deploy with RTAD, it seems the network shared variables are not there. The PC side can't communicate with cRio RT.

Thanks!

[Burt_S]

Hello,

I am pretty sure that I have tried this in the past and it has worked successfully.  Do the cRIO variable libraries show up in the Distributed Systems Manager (DSM)?  What type of variables are these and how many libraries do you have?  Can you reproduce this behavior with a very simple cRIO and Windows application?

[Mads]

Where is the CDF file stored, and why cannot I input that location as a parameter in the build specification?

I just started using LV2011 on an old RT project and checked the "Create a component definition file..." checkbox to get an image I can deploy with the deployment tool. According to this page the cdf file should show up in a folder named National Instruments\RT Images\User Created Startup Applications, but no such folder exists, nor am I able to find any *.cdf file on my machine that could be the file I was expecting to be generated...

Where is it?

It would also be nice if there was an input to specifuy where the image was to be generated, if no such input exists today (perhaps the problem is that I have overlooked this somewhere...).

[JoshuaP]

The CDF file that is generated should be stored in C:\Program Files\National Instruments\RT Images\User Components (32-bit Windows) or C:\Program Files x86\National Instruments\RT Images\User Components (64-bit Windows).  Note that you may have to look in the sub-folders that are created for the different projects to find the CDF files.  LV should automatically generate a new one everytime you build your startup application.

The reason we don't provide an user selectable directory is because MAX and the NI System Configuration API only searches for CDF files in the RT Images folder.  If you placed it somewhere else MAX wouldn't be able to find it when you launch the Installation Wizard.

[Mads]

Ah. A bit difficult to figure out. The help window and the web page here on ni.com should mention the full paths.

I hoped to get a single image file (like the .lvappimg files generated by RTAD), and if I could I would have configured it to go straight to a file server where other people could get at it as the point of having the image is to enable others to deploy it to their PACs...

I can use the deployment tool instead for this of course, but it would have been nice if the new feature had targeted such a use case.

[Caseyw]

Hello,

Thank you for noting that the path is incorrect in the white paper about CDFs on ni.com. I have corrected the error.

Best Regards,

Casey Weltzin

LabVIEW Product Manager

National Instruments

[Mads]

The path is still incomplete on this page:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/12919

It is really bad that both the app builder and MAX is assuming that images are stored locally...(no config option for MAX either as far as I can see). I'm pretty sure most companies will store such things centrally on a server and would want the tools to save and retrieve images from there.

[kent.wedeking]

FYI ... anyone that was trying to do image deployment to an RT using the MAX System Config vis in LabVIEW in LV2010 ... they would NOT deploy an image with a deployed executable in it.  Was a known issue for about 6 months.

So I installed LV2011 Dev Suite this week, and then reran my code that previously didn't work in LV2010 (and I ran it in 2010) ... AND IT WORKED!!!  Kudos to NI for fixing my problem.  I was REALLY hoping that it would be not fixed after the install in 2010, but would work in 2011, so I'd have an excuse to upgrade ... now i've got to find some other "reason" to take this project to 2011 ....

[JoshuaP]

Once you have built your application you can optionally copy your RT images folder to a shared network drive.  You can then use the NI System Configuration API to create a simple application for deploying your software.  The NI System Configuration API "System" property node allows you to temporarily change your "Repository Location" for the duration of that session, which can be a network share like //myshare/rtimages.  That would enable you to deploy software to any target on your network using the shared rt image repository with nothing more than a LabVIEW built executable that would depend on the LV runtime engine and the NI System Configuration runtime engine (MAX not required).

[JoshuaP]

Attached is an example on how you can use the NI System Configuration API to deploy a startup application to a LVRT 2011 target.