Re: questions concerning emc-0.9-25.src.tgz

[shackle <shackle-at-cme.nist.gov>]

The state of inisim is probably my fault.

Ray's guesses were very good. 

A couple of months ago the only simulator for the motors was the non-realtime
program emcmotsim.
Running it non-realtime has the disadvantage that you can't use realistic motor
parameters and still get even reasonably good control. (We ussually compensated
for  this with very unrealistic simulated motor parameters in the ini file.)

emcmotsim reads the .ini file to get those motor parameters directly. But
simmod.o the new realtime version of it needs a non-realtime program to feed it
those parameters. Which is what inisim is. In inisim/simmod.o I also added the
use of NML directly to the realtime module. NML is best used with a certain
amount of code generation. The file simmot_n.cc is automatically generated
using a java tool. Not long after adding it I noticed that if I tried to
compile on a system with no java virtual machine installed, the error "java
command not found" would pop up. Since I still expected most people to use
emcmotsim instead of simmod.o/inisim, I decided to fix this by just leaving it
out of the default compile. It can also be fixed by simply including the
generated file simmot_n.cc in the distribution, just as we do with emc.cc. (In
fact I think this is already done.)  Then other users won't need java to create
it.

Simple fix:

change EMCMOT=simmod.o to EMCMOT=emcmotsim, use non-realtime simulater and you
won't need inisim.

I probably changed sim.ini in my copy to test the real-time simulator and
forgot to change it back before 
checking it into sourceforge. Either the gains or the simulated motor
parameters may also  have to be changed to make the simulation work better.



More ambitious fix:

Add inisim to the BINS in the non-realtime section of  Makefile in the
emc/src/emcsim directory so that inisim is built by default.
Check to make sure the auto generation of simmot_n.cc is no longer a problem on
systems without java  and/or at least be ready for possible questions on the
subject.


-- Will