The aim of the Virtual Lab project is to provide students access via the Internet to various experiments in control engineering, which are situated in control laboratories at several universities. In this post, I am going to share some tools and techniques in virtual environments that allow us to set up our virtual environment so that we can control each experiment in a virtual environment on any operating system for Windows or Linux.
We will firstly create an isolated environment in a test bench to hold all the simulation runs. Then, we will make it available by using virtual lab and run VLC from within the same machine (for example running vb-cli, etc.) so that we can play around with different methods to trigger simulations without worrying about configuration and system issues.
It would be better if you created your own test bench if you want to do experimental work in physical test benches. This way, you have more space to make your experiment as big as possible!
In order to use these files within another VLC file, however, we need to create them once and let everyone know what they are. We will create such a one manually by adding the folder that contains our simulation files to the working directory. This way, when someone attempts to open a simulation file there, he can only be able to see what’s in that simulation and not the whole working setup of the simulator. It takes longer than usual if you don’t have an isolated environment for the rest of your tests just to get access to simulations, but if you need to have an isolation environment for all simulations you can add this subdirectory as well. We also like to keep separate directories for all simulation files and other sources of data. Here, I will share my very simple example and explain how useful this idea could be.
The second key concept of this implementation, besides having a subdirectory for all files, is to have an appropriate virtual environment inside a main directory: The name of the main directory is called ‘videobox’. This is often used in many projects related to video systems. You can create several vb-environments within a single folder with specific names for different purposes for e.g., testing the CPU of a network card. The name will be different depending on the type of software environment you want to use (e.g., vb-emulators, simulators on Unix, etc.). If you don’t know how to create vb-environments, let me describe a basic flowchart.
If you find the necessary files in the root directory, create this one instead. There will be no problems in creating the desired vb-environment in this case. To change settings, you need to start from the desktop and check the settings file:
This time, after changing the setting, close the command line and enter again the command to change the working directory. After that, you need to restart the computer to return to the previous point and start again one more attempt:
Now if you try to run videobox again by entering this command, you will receive an error: “You tried to start a simulation from scratch, please take a break now, please type ‘quit’.” Now you have to do exactly that:
Afterward, you can see again ‘videobox.’
Finally, I wanted to tell everybody who works in control simulation that virtual labs are important topics for us. This is why I decided to publish more information about VR and control systems .
