Mac running Windows (Allen Bradley and Weintek)

I have a customer (a college) and they are buying trainers and HMI's for their class, the instructor just called and said he received information that all his laptops that are coming are Mac's

Anyone else using Mac's and is it a pain to setup Windows, he was told that he needed to partition the HD and run Windows on the other side... do they not have a VM ?

Any thoughts? sounds like he is starting off on the wrong side of things and is in for a long uphill battle

Thanks
Mark

geniusintraining,

Peter Nachtwey has stated several times that he uses a Mac. Worth a call.

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/member.php?u=71

Thanks Mickey,

Yes I remember him stating that... but Peter is more than the average Joe when it comes to brains so something easy to him may not be so easy for other like myself, I think I may suggest they give the Mac's a second thought

I would hate for them to spend all the class time trying to fix software compatibility issues and not learning PLC's

geniusintraining said:

Thanks Mickey,

Yes I remember him stating that... but Peter is more than the average Joe when it comes to brains so something easy to him may not be so easy for other like myself, I think I may suggest they give the Mac's a second thought

I would hate for them to spend all the class time trying to fix software compatibility issues and not learning PLC's

Click to expand...

Getting your PLC software to run is half the battle sometimes! Sounds like a valuable learning experience. But seriously, 99% of people are going to be running this type of software on windows PCs so I think that would make a lot more sense.

I use a Macbook with BootCamp. It's Apple's built in means for a Windows partition and generally easy to set up. Windows is installed natively on the hard drive without a VM. Parallels and VMware are two popular VM's. VMware seems more popular in business. Other World Computing has great instructional videos and more on almost any Mac topic.
https://www.macsales.com/

I use a Mac as my main computer and rather than use Bootcamp/Parallels to install Windows on it I have always preferred using a VM (Started off with VMWare, ended up on VirtualBox because of price - it's free ).

Configuring the VM to use the host's Ethernet port is not hard to do. Other benefits of a VM is that you can keep an offline backup and re-download when the students screw up the system and/or infect it with viruses. I have heard of one college system where they did an automated nightly roll back of all changes to the OS so that things were always fresh first thing in the morning.

Personal annecdote. When my main laptop was a Windows 7 system a client asked me to install Cimplicity HMI to checkout a bug. For what ever reason the install failed and creamed my laptop to the point that I had to re-install windows. I became a big fan of VMs after that.

There are only three options. VMWare's Fusion, Parallels and Boot Camp. I have been a long time VWWare user going way back so I have stuck with VMWare's Fusion. What I like about it is that I can switch back and forth between the Mac and Windows XP with just a swipe on the track pad.

Back in the days of MS Vista I got a new computer with Vista on it. I hated it and gave the Vista computer back to the IT guy and bought a Mac Pro with VWWare ( 2009 ). I still have it a few feet from me now

With Fusion I have had very few problems. The ones I have had were small and could be fixed using configuration. Because I had imported and upgrade my VMs from previous machines I had the USB speed set to 1.1. Make sure you change this to 2. USB 2 uses a different driver from 1.1.

Another problem I have had is optimizing the Ethernet port. My Mac Pro has two Ethernet ports. I Ethernet 1 use to interface to the company domain using DHCP. Our network is using 192.168.0.0. I use Ethernet 2 on my local domain with manually set IPs. 10.0.1.2 for my Mac Pro, 10.0.1.3 for my Mac Book Pro and 10.0.1.4 and above for PLCs and RMC motion controllers. Ethernet 2 is in Bridged Mode. You need to make sure the Mac's Ethernet settings have the same IP address etc as the VMWare's IP address.

You can use a VM and run windows on that, then pass the USB devices directly to windows. It adds another layer of complexity to comm's troubleshooting. Feel free to PM about that issue. There may also be some networking stuff that causes a headache too, as you have to deal with the internal switching.

sparkie said:

You can use a VM and run windows on that, then pass the USB devices directly to windows.

Click to expand...

When you plug in a USB device, Fusion ( VMWare ) asks which operating the USB device should be connected to. You simply make a selection. There is an option chose the default operating system a USB device is connected to.

Thank you all for the great information and I will pass it on

The only issue I see is that doing this maybe better for a IT class vs a PLC class, I would hate for someone to get frustrated with programming and not be able to get to program.... most (90%) of my phone/email support is trying to get connected to the PLC

Thanks again
Mark

geniusintraining said:

Thank you all for the great information and I will pass it on

The only issue I see is that doing this maybe better for a IT class vs a PLC class, I would hate for someone to get frustrated with programming and not be able to get to program.... most (90%) of my phone/email support is trying to get connected to the PLC

Thanks again
Mark

Click to expand...

You are absolutely right. The IT department really screwed the pooch on this one. I would say this is okay for an advanced PLC class to teach skills and techniques related to networking / PLC comms / troubleshooting but is really not good for an introductory PLC class by any means.

I also am a mac user with VM Fusion, just makes life easier with VMs for all my various brands of PLC software, two rockwell, one siemens, one modicon, one mitsubishi etc.

All my software is in VMs these days. If the instructor sets it up right the students won't even have to think about it.

Also easier for him... set up one VM, test that it works as expected, then copy it onto each laptop. Hours of software installation saved! Studio 5000 takes forever...

I also use a mac. I've used VMWare Fusion and never had any major problems (apart from Windows-related problems, and once I filled it with curry, which caused a few problems).
I definitely agree that using Macs introduces a level of complexity that's not necessary and could be a distraction from the main task of learning PLC's. But on the flip side, I'd estimate that 75% of us here use VM's, and probably 50% of us use them exclusively. Give it another 10 years and I'd fully expect those numbers to be pushing 100%. Anyone who wants to program a PLC had better have at least a passing knowledge of VM's, and IT in general.

O.T slightly but do any of you Mac users run Autocad for Mac?