A bit of a long shot here, anyone got any experience with the TSM-1017 (NI's 17 inch touch screen)

[Neil Pate]

One of my old customers is having an issue with the TSM-1017 losing its ability to be calibrated. The system runs on a cRIO and the screen is attached with a USB cable as well as the DVI cable. On Linux RT there is an application you can run that brings up a four point calibration, but apparently this application does not run anymore.

This did all work once upon a time, but the system has been out of my hands for a very long time.

NI support gave some very manual linux-ey commands to reinstall drivers or something, but I do not think this worked.

Has anyone come across a situation like this before?

[MichaelBalzer]

Hi Neil,

The TSM-101x calibration issues have caused me no end of problems. It'll lose calibration if the USB cable is unplugged and plugged in while the cRIO is on. It'll lose calibration if you run the calibration utility twice in a row. It was impossible to calibrate at all running on an older version of CompactRIO drivers (I think 18.0 didn't work, but 19.0+ does). I've raised all these issues previously but only get back the same set of KB articles, and they don't solve anything - manual edits to the 99-calibration.conf file don't work, or simply cause the screen to go black.

The only reliable solution I've found was from distributor support (not direct NI support - that doesn't exist any more). It uses a different calibration program called gCal. Again it's very command line based, but at least it works. Copied and pasted from the support email:

 

Software stack:

• NI CompactRIO 20.0

Reference:

• Touch Screen Troubleshooting - NI TSM-1015

Pre-work: (login with SSH and run the commands below)

• Remove xinput_calibrator
  • opkg remove --nodeps xinput-calibrator
• Install bzip2
  • opkg update
  • opkg install bzip2

Install Penmount 6000 USB Drive for Linux (X11): (login with SSH and run the commands below)

• Check the X.Org version
  • export DISPLAY=:0
  • xdpyinfo | grep version
    • X.Org Version should be 1.19.6 in 20.0 stack
• Install Driver
  • wget https://www.salt.com.tw/tw/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/10/PenMount-Debian-9_32-64bit_driver-v4.5.7_R6.tar.bz2
  • tar -xjf PenMount-Debian-9_32-64bit_driver-v4.5.7_R6.tar.bz2
  • cp pmLinux-Debian9/x86_64/24.1/penmount_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/
  • chmod +x pmLinux-Debian9/x86_64/*
  • cp pmLinux-Debian9/x86_64/* /usr/sbin/
  • pm-setup -s
• Reboot the cRIO
• Start calibration
  • export DISPLAY=:0
  • gCal 4

 

Another thing you might try is swapping the USB cable for a different one. This managed to fix up a calibration issue in one of our systems.

Sorry for the rant at the start, but this has got to be one of NI's most poorly supported products (except for maybe the Functional Safety Editor - that's built on the bones of NXG, and we know how that turned out).

[MichaelBalzer]

Looks like that info was taken from this link: https://forums.ni.com/t5/NI-Linux-Real-Time-Documents/Touch-Screen-Troubleshooting-NI-TSM-1015/ta-p/3537931?profile.language=en

[hooovahh]

15 hours ago, MichaelBalzer said:

Sorry for the rant at the start, but this has got to be one of NI's most poorly supported products (except for maybe the Functional Safety Editor -

Oh wow never heard of this thing, and now that I'm looking at it, it sure seems like trying to solve a problem that has already been solved with state machine templates or State Diagram Toolkit, with an RT or FPGA.

[bjustice]

4 hours ago, hooovahh said:

Oh wow never heard of this thing, and now that I'm looking at it, it sure seems like trying to solve a problem that has already been solved with state machine templates or State Diagram Toolkit, with an RT or FPGA.

My understanding is that the functional safety editor, paired with the yellow c-series safety modules yield a SIL-3 (safety integrity level) certified hardware/software solution.  This SIL level is often a requirement for situations that could put humans at risk of harm.  Neither the LabVIEW nor NXG environments would be able to carry this rating, so they stripped out a slim version of NXG and pushed it through a bunch of verification to obtain the safety rating.

I played around with it, and it was pretty neat.  I wouldn't regard it as anything more than a smart/configurable relay capable of fitting into a c-series slot and sending data back to the controller via the backplane.

[MichaelBalzer]

8 hours ago, hooovahh said:

Oh wow never heard of this thing, and now that I'm looking at it, it sure seems like trying to solve a problem that has already been solved with state machine templates or State Diagram Toolkit, with an RT or FPGA.

It is very similar to the State Diagram Toolkit, but has so many more rough edges (and that toolkit was rough). As @bjustice mentioned, it's more about the SIL compliance than anything else.

We've deployed it in an application that required minimum SIL-2 certification for some subsystems, otherwise an FPGA + state machine would've been far more flexible and my preferred choice. The SIL modules themselves (NI-935x hardware) operate using custom firmware on an FPGA, and can operate entirely independently of the cRIO. The FSE compiles the state diagrams into a bin file, which is then uploaded to the SIL module which the firmware then reads and executes, handling I/O, timing, and state transition logic. The I/O can also be configured in passthrough mode, and is then accessible using the scan engine.

My main problem with it is it's just so damned buggy and unpolished. I wrote a feedback thread about it on NI's forum, but haven't seen anything from NI since, much less an updated version (current is version 2018).

It really did feel like it was pushed through for certification (presumably for a large customer) - it's only ever seen two release versions. I guess each release needs recertification for SIL compliance which costs time and money, but I think there are enough bugs and errata in it to justify at least one more release.

Apologies for derailing the thread, @Neil Pate - did those instructions help with the screen calibration?

[Neil Pate]

Sorry I thought I had replied here, but it looked like I did not click Submit!

Thanks for everyone's comments. I have passed them on to my customer.