Next thing we need to do is setup IORates.
In this particular case, I have used
notepad from my command window on my PI3
Server to create a text file with commands
and data for the PIConfig utility.
We can do this also with the system management tools for PI3.
What I have done is selected my
table and point class and set the mode to create true.
And I am going to use the same file for editing in the future. And I have
created some tags here and I will explain what these
three tags in more detail in a moment. But I have got a
snap-shot ready for Bobcat and an update ready for Bobcat. Bobcat
is the name of my PINet node. And then fractal
is my interface or simulation program over here.
And I ran PIConfig
from the command line, re-directing my
text file as input and capturing the results
as output. And then I typed the output
here and we can see that I successfully created three tags.
Let's see what this looks like on the VMS
side. On the VMS side there is a utility
called [inaudible]
And I can type
in SY.IO.
*
And I will get a list of the points that exist over
here. Note something interesting, for each
point, I have got two ID numbers.
There is a SYIOBobcat and
SYIOBobatEV, SYIOBobcatFractal
And then I have also got
a name here that looks kind of funny. We call
this the commingled tag name. Tag names in a PINet
node are internally stored using 10 characters.
If the tag name is longer than that,
we artificially create a short name that we call the
comingled tag name. The commingled tag name is
similar to the
8.3 filenames that you find in Windows.
So what we have done is we have
taken the first part of the long name
and a tilde and a number where the number is the Point ID
for the point. These
commingled names are going to be important in a moment
because I am going to want to edit a
file called IORates.DAT
to create a table that references a PI Tag Name
and it has to be a short Tag Name
to a
counter number. The interfaces
or the sources of data
on the PINet node can use a counter number
to report the IORates. The PINet node
has up to 200 counters. The
counter numbers are unique per node, so I can use counter #1
on one machine and that's different than counter #1 on the next machine and so on.
Some of the counters are reserved for
the use by the PINet software itself.
The reserved counters are in the range of 35 - 50.
So let's take a look at the IORates.DAT file.
So here we can see that I have edited the IORates.DAT
file and I have added files here for SYIOBobcat
and BobcatEV and Fractal. And I have
set the counter numbers. But notice that I used
the long name. And what I am going to have to
do is scroll my screen back up here to figure out what the
short name was and use that.
So let's see if I copy
this and paste it in here.
And I am going to comment out the
original line just so I have got it there for
reference purposes.
And I am going to paste it
again-- since I looked ahead, I know that this is going
to be 2. And again I am going to comment out
the instance of the long name.
And I need to do something also with this one.
Now the fractal program is using counter #40 which is in that
range which I said was reserved for use by the PINet programs.
It turns out fractals is one of the programs
that is allowed to use the counters in the reserved
range. If I were using something like a Chip2PI
interface or VG interface or one of the others,
I would need to stay away from the 35 - 50 range.
So I have setup my IORates.DAT file here.
And control-z to save and exit my file.
Unlike interfaces,
the IORates sub-system on a PINet
node... Here is teh IORates sub-system. It does not
automatically sign up for updates. In order for it to
sign up for updates, you need to be checking
the IORates.dat file for changes.
So in order to tell IORates I changed its configuration file,
I need to stop and restart the IORates sub-system.
And I can do that just like stopping an
interface. I can say @pinet
stop IORates
and then when
it is stopped, I can just restart it.
It is a very quick process.
If I wanted to know how to do that,
I could have used the search command or the edit
command to take a look at the
PINetStart.com file to see how PI starts and
stops IORates.
Or I could have checked the manual. But I was in a hurry
There is an IOMonitor utility on a PINet
node. This is similar to the
output you see perhaps with
PIErrorTool-ss on a PI Server. With IOMonitor
if you specify a scan period, 5 seconds is typical.
And it show you
the output. In this case I have
mis-configured something in my IORates.dat file. I am probably missing a comma
somewhere so I need to edit that. So I will fix
that and we will come back.