OBLAC Drives Virtual Machine

Important

This section is only required if you are not using OBLAC Drives Box

Prerequisite

  • OBLAC Drives Virtual Machine is run on a virtualization software. VMware Player version 14 or above for Windows and Linux or VMware Fusion 10 for macOS are needed for running OBLAC Drives Virtual Machine.

Note

OBLAC Drives is an application that runs in a Web Browser. We recommend the latest version of Google Chrome.

Getting started

  1. Download the OBLAC Drives Virtual Machine image

Download OBLAC Drives

If you have trouble downloading from Amazon webservice, please try our Baidu server:

Download OBLAC Drives from Baidu

WindowsmacOSLinuxWindows

  1. Install and open VMware Workstation Player

Note

ANY version of VMWare Workstation Player starting from 14.0 can be used for OBLAC Drives.

  1. Open a virtual machine

  2. Select the downloaded OBLAC Drives image (OVA file) and import it to VMware Player

Note

If you get a warning that the import failed, just click “Retry” and it will run.

You may also check “Do not show this message again”

  1. Go to Virtual Machine Settings and check if two network adapters are available - one set to NAT and one set to Bridged (Automatic)

    1. Ensure that the “Replicate physical network connection state” option is checked

    2. Press OK to save changes

    ../../../_images/OBLAC_Drives_VMware_manual_1.png

  2. Power up and connect the slaves.

  3. Power on the virtual machine

macOS

  1. Install and open VMware Fusion

Note

ANY version of VMWare Fusion starting from 10.0 can be used for OBLAC Drives.

  1. Open the OBLAC Drives image (OVA file) in VMware Fusion

Note

If you get a warning that the import failed, just click “Retry” and it will run.

You may also check “Do not show this message again”

../../../_images/OBLAC_Drives_VMware_manual_2.png

  1. Edit the Virtual Machine Settings and set the following (if not already set)

    ../../../_images/OBLAC_Drives_VMware_manual_3.png

    • Set the number of processor cores to 2

    • Check the “Enable hypervisor application” option

      ../../../_images/OBLAC_Drives_VMware_manual_4.png

    • The network adapters should be set to: Private to my Mac

      ../../../_images/private_2_mac.png

  2. Power up and connect the slaves.

  3. Play the virtual machine.

Linux

  1. Install and open VMware Workstation Player

Note

ANY version of VMWare Workstation Player starting from 14.0 can be used for OBLAC Drives.

  1. Open a virtual machine

  2. Select the downloaded OBLAC Drives image (OVA file) and import it to VMware Player

Note

If you get a warning that the import failed, just click “Retry” and it will run.

You may also check “Do not show this message again”

  1. Go to Virtual Machine Settings and check if two network adapters are available - one set to NAT and one set to Bridged (Automatic)

    1. Ensure that the “Replicate physical network connection state” option is checked

    2. Press OK to save changes

      ../../../_images/OBLAC_Drives_VMware_manual_7.png

  2. Network settings

    1. Execute

    sudo /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-netcfg

    1. Select the bridged network adapter and bridge it to the system network adapter to which the slaves are connected to

      1. The network adapter has to be an Ethernet connection, so it likely starts with “eth”

    2. Save changes

    ../../../_images/OBLAC_Drives_VMware_manual_8.png

  3. Power up and connect the slaves.

To connect your host PC with the servo drive, simply plug the EtherCAT cable on your Ethernet port (RJ45) of your PC and connect it to the servo drive on EtherCAT port IN.

Details about this connector for SOMANET Node and SOMANET Circulo.

  1. Play the virtual machine

  2. In case your systems hints that a swap partition is needed:

    ../../../_images/swap_needed.png
    instead of creating such a partition you can also use this workaround:

    • Close the VMware Player

    • Run
      sudo gedit /etc/vmware/config
    • Add
      prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"

      at the end of the file and save

    • Restart the VMware Player

Connecting to OBLAC Drives

Once your virtual machine is powered up, you will find the IP address of OBLAC Drives at the top of the screen. Enter this IP address in your browser and wait for OBLAC Drives to show the connected drives.

../../../_images/browser.png

Connect your PC via EtherCAT cable to the servo drive. For tuning, you may connect several servo drives via EtherCAT and tune one by one.

../../../_images/OBLAC_tuning.png

Please check in you browser that the Drive is connected:

../../../_images/drive_connect.png

Update OBLAC Drives

Before using OBLAC Drives, you need to install the latest version of OBLAC Drives with our OBLAC Drives Update Service.

It is possible to use OBLAC Drives Box offline and to install and run the previous versions of OBLAC Drives. Newer versions of OBLAC Drives that get installed will be cached on the box, but they will have to be downloaded from the Internet.

That’s it! You may now proceed to commission your SOMANET servo drive:

Set up your drive system

How to set the parameters for your motor and sensors correctly.

Troubleshooting

  1. Always give OBLAC Drives up to a minute to detect the available drives after they have been powered on or connected

  2. If the drives aren’t found, or anything else seems to be wrong, please try refreshing the web page first and then power cycling the drive(s)

  3. If you are running Windows, please ensure that the power-saving functionality for LAN is turned OFF

../../../_images/win-power-save.png

  1. In some cases after the start-up of OBLAC Drives the URL isn’t shown and the website can’t get accessed. In that case, please try switching the order of the network adapters in the VMware setting for that virtual machine:

  1. Bridged (Automatic)

  2. NAT

There are more issues listed in our Troubleshooting Guide.