Example Code
Please see the Replication and Deployment (RAD) Utility document for a list of current features and instructions for use.
Overview
The purpose of this document is to provide a repository for community ideas and code that could improve the RAD utility (formerly known as RTAD). Please post any feedback or code to this document.
Description
This example uses the System Configuration Tools to provide a more complete turn-key utility for managing LabVIEW RT Application Images. The two main functions of this utility are to:
- Retrieve application images from a RT target and store them on the local harddrive.
- Deploy an RT application image from the local harddrive to one or more RT targets connected on the network.
In addition this utility can interactively configure some of the network settings of LabVIEW RT targets.
This example is intended to be customized for the particular needs of an individual application or customer.
Note: An Application Image is the contents of the harddrive of a LabVIEW RT target. In order to replicate or duplicate LabVIEW RT applications in large quantity you create a master target with the desired application image and then copy (retrieve) and deploy the application image from the master to other RT targets.
Requirements
This example requires the following software. These must be installed in order to load and run this example.
For the RAD application installer:
- LabVIEW 2012 Run-Time Engine
- NI System Configuration 5.5.1 (or higher)
- Optional: NI-RIO (Necessary for deploying images with bitfiles)
For the RAD source code:
- LabVIEW 2012 Full Development System
- LabVIEW Real-Time 2012
- NI System Configuration 5.5.1 (or higher)
- NI-RIO
Optional:
**This document has been updated to meet the current required format for the NI Code Exchange.**
Example code from the Example Code Exchange in the NI Community is licensed with the MIT license.
I am getting a TCP Read Timeout (Error 56) towards the end of the Image Retrieval. I have tried 2 different cRIO's (9074) with the same result. The file it gets stuck on is random and I have
verified that I can manually FTP into the controller and retrieve that file. Any Ideas? Is my image file getting too big? Too bad the Get Target Image vi is password protected so that we cannot fix
NI's bugs for them...
The TCP Read Timeout error is caused by the FTP server on the LabVIEW Real-Time target, as it holds on to sockets used for transferring files for an extended period of time and eventually runs out of available sockets. I have provided an update to the RT System Replication Tools above which provides a work around to this issue by adding some extra Wait time while downloading files from the RT FTP server.
Note on installing the RTTSR_Update.zip files:
Installing Real-Time Target System Replication 8.x
To install Real-Time Target System Replication 8.x, create a folder named SystemReplication in [NI DIR]\LabVIEW 8.x\user.lib, where [NI DIR] is your National Instruments directory. Copy the contents of the download into the folder while preserving the folder heirarchy.
The System Replication palette will appear as a subpalette of the the User Libraries palette the next time you launch LabVIEW.
sources:
Mark,
During developement and testing I was able to transfer at least two files per second. The update SW included in this document does limit the file transfer to two files/second by default to eliminate an issue in the FTP server on the RT system in older versions of LabVIEW. I have not seen the transfer runnign as slow as you describe.
Can you list your specific SW versions and describe the network topology between the RT target and the Windows machine used to create the image?
Mark,
Can you try running the network connection through a switch. I've seen reports that a crossover connection can actually be significantly slower than going through a switch in some cases.
What are the network SW configurations for each machine? You should disable DHCP _and_ DNS so that the Windows machine doesn't try to query these servers, and configure each machine for a static IP address. When specifying the RT target for FTP, do you use a logical name or its IP address. Please try the IP address if you have not already done so.
Please set the Subnet mask on the RT target to the same as the host (255.255.255.0)
Please try the following VI from our FTP site to benchmark the FTP transfer rate.
ftp://ftp.natinst.com/outgoing/FTP_Get_Files_from_Folder.vi
Do you have any VIs running on the target while transferring the image?
Mark,
Go to the following page and select the Stop email notifications option at the top right of the page.
Hi Burt,
These created files are empty, without any extension, their names are time stamped using this format %HHMMSSDDMMYY, and present in every non-empty folders (see snapshot). How can you extract the data from the image? they are not ZIP-File but LVAPPIMG, or is there a way to view the content through the RAD directly?
Hi Burt,
Sorry for the late answer, but it occurs that only my colleague has this strange behaviour. So I couldn't reproduce it and reply your post.
It means it's working fine on my laptop, not on my colleagues. To answer your next question, both PCs are identical. (Same company Notebook, win 7, 64bit). But... I have LV 2010, 2011 and 2012 on my PC with Alliance Partner DVDs. My colleague has only LV 2011 on it. The cRIO is developed with LV2011, and was installed by my colleague, so with RT 2011 and the correct version of NI-RIO and other drivers.
So, we tested the RAD on his machine, the cRIO hasn't any time-stamped files. we created an image, unzipped it--> OK. By retrieving it, this artefact appeared, creating erverywhere these file. (every folder is affected). So it happens by retrieving the image.
Interesting to notice, the more files on a folder, the more unwanted files will be created.
Could it be that these files are for some reason intentionally and not correctly removed because of let's say driver incompatiblity?
To go deeper in your investigation, you may need the whole cRIO Image, MAX printscreen. It makes sense to continue with E-Mails, don't you think?
A bit of a side note; but is there any way to make an RT target replace its own OS and application?
We have PACs that will only be available via a serial link, so we will have to write a protocol to allow us to do upgrades of the software without network access. A boot loader if you will, with a serial interface (or in an ideal world we would just set the PAC in a special mode, and then still be able to use RAD to apply an image, but across a serial link
).
I remember seeing something about a framework for replacing the application on an RT target, but have not yet figured out where that was. Just replacing the executable and its configuration files is something that would be relatively easy to accomplish (although it's still a job that would be great to find done already 
) ), but changing the RTE e.g. seems less doable...A feature that allowed a PAC to pick up an image file from e.g. the flash drive (which we can put there via a serial interface) and apply it to itself would be great.
Mads,
The answer depends on your specific PAC (which platform, processor and RTOS). All cRIO targets based on a PowerPC processor use VxWorks for the RTOS and it is fairly straightforward to replace/update their RTE. You can replace all of the files on the local storage while the system is running and reboot the controller to install and load a new application and RTE.
The following reference design provides an example and code for doing this from a USB memory device. You would need to adapt this code to read the files from your serial device.
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/epd/p/id/5970
PACs using a x86 processor (inclusing the cRIO-908x) are based on Pharlap ETS RTOS. ETS does not allow you to replace system files while it is running. It requires you to boot the controller into Safe Mode before you can replace these files. I am not aware of any ready made code that automates this process.
Does anyone use RAD's feature to "Configure Bitfiles for FPGA Flash Deployment" to flash a FPGA bitfile along with the image?
Note, I'm assuming most people just include their FPGA bitfile with their RT application and don't require that it be flashed to the FPGA.
We are considering dropping support for the ability to flash the bitfile for some of the older cRIO controllers, but we don't know how many customers this may impact. This would enable us to transition more of the RAD to using the officially supported NI System Configuration API and remove some of the unsupported FPGA replication VIs.
If you use this feature please let me know which cRIO controllers you would like us to support.
Has anyone tried RAD 5.5.0 and found any problems? I installed this version and found it succesfully retrieves the image from one sbRIO9636 but failed on another one.
The software installed on the two sbRIO9636 are basically the same, and both of the two boards can be detected as targets in RAD.
Here is the screen shot of the error message when failing to retrieve:
After debugging with the source code, I found out that the error is produced when calling "Create System Image (Folder).vi".
And according to the error code,-2147220612, it measns: None of the changed properties can be validated.
So is there any thing wrong at the host side or the RT side please? You can see that there are two 9636 detected in the target list, but only one of the two can be retrieved, it's wierd.
Zhiqiang Tu
