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Chapter
6
Reference Manual
IVC-2D
242
©
SICK AG • Advanced Industrial Sensors • www.sick.com • All rights reserved
Troubleshooting
6.2
Saving to Flash
How the flash works
The flash disk consists of a number of sectors. A sector can only be written to once. This
means that if a file is edited, the sectors containing the previous version of the file are
marked as “dead space”, and a complete copy of the new version of the file is written to
one or more new sectors. I.e. the amount of “dead space” will increase each time some-
thing is written to the flash disk.
To be able to access the sectors marked as “dead space”, the flash must be “defrag-
mented”. This is normally performed using the “Clear Unused Memory” option from the
Flash menu of the device in the Device list.
Saving to Flash
results in ”ITF
Error = 2”
The execution time for saving large data blocks or images to the
flash may be longer than the time-out that is set in IVC Studio. In
that case, IVC Studio will report that it lost contact with the device
when the device is in fact busy saving.
Solution
• Increase
the
R/W command timeout
limit in
Options
Æ
Configurati-
on
Æ
Timeout
.
When saving images, the values in the ‘Save Image to Flash’
tool description can be used as a rough guideline. Set the new
timeout to several 100 ms above the max value to avoid time-
out errors.
Saving to Flash
suddenly takes
much longer time
If the execution time for saving to flash using 'Save data block to
flash' or 'Save image to flash' suddenly increases, the device may
have run out of free flash memory blocks. In this case the device
needs to clear a previously used (but now unused) memory block
before saving, something that takes some time. The execution time
can in this case be shortened by manually clearing the unused
memory.
Solution
•
Check the amount of free memory on the device by right-
clicking the device in the device list and choosing
Device Mana-
gement
Æ
Device information.
• If
FFS free size
is low and
FFS dead size
is large,
clear unused (dead) memory by right-clicking the device and
choosing
Flash
Æ
Clear unused memory
.
Note that excessive writing to the flash memory may shorten its
working life. The flash memory is specified for 100.000 re-writings.
To access the
flash disk of the
Emulator
The flash disk of the Emulator is found on the PC under My Docu-
ments (Documents in Vista) for the current user. The default path to
the Emulator flash is:
My Documents\SICKIVP\SmartCameras\IVC Studio x.x\ Emula-
tor\flash
Automatic defragmentation
All tools that write to the flash disk can automatically clear dead space and perform a
defragmentation of the flash disk. This functionality is controlled by the parameter
Dead-
SpaceThreshold
in the Smartreader.ini configuration file. It is also possible to configure the
parameter in the
Ethernet Device Configuration
dialog, available on the
Op-
tions
Æ
Configuration
Æ
Ethernet Devices
menu of IVC Studio. If the amount of dead space
exceeds the threshold, the flash disk will be cleared from dead space before the informa-
tion is written to the disk. This means that the tools may take substantially longer to exe-
cute in some situations. In general, it is not recommended to use these tools in the normal