Workspaces

What is a workspace?

A workspace in MotionLab3 is any combination of Scope, Display and Control widgets that a user might use for the purpose of their testing. Therefore, a workspace includes:

• A Control widget with a set of registers displayed in the graphical way that the user has chosen

• A Display widget with a set of registers displayed in the graphical way that the user has chosen

• A Scope widget with its different charts with its respective parameters for plotting and the plotting settings that the user has considered more convenient for the testing

If you think about it, almost every feature in MotionLab3 is a workspace in essence. For example, all the Tune and Jogs are workspaces and the same goes for all the steps in the Configuration Wizard. 

See below a list of default workspaces that MotionLab3 has.

Examples of workspaces

• Current direct tuning window

• Current quadrature tuning window

• Velocity tuning window

• Position tuning window

• Voltage jog

• Current jog

• Velocity jog

• Position jog

• Homing Jog

• Every step of the configuration wizard

Why are workspaces are important?

Besides the fact that workspaces are the basis of the MotionLab3 software itself, workspaces are very important because in most cases they will end up being the final working environment of the user. For most users, the default settings of the Tune windows and the Jogs do not contain all the necessary information that they want so they will always need to:

• Add additional parameters to Display/Control widgets

• Remove default parameters from Display/Control widgets

• Change the graphical representation of certain parameters in the Display/Control

• Add additional Scope charts for plotting

• Changing plotting settings in the Scope

And so on. An example of a custom workspace can be seen in the picture below:

All these deviations from the default workspaces of MotionLab3 require actions and changes that are tedious to repeat every time that the user works with the software so it is important that once the workspace is properly defined, that it is possible to store it in a file so that it can be loaded back again in the future and avoid spending the time reconfiguring it again. 

How to save/load workspaces 

In order to save/load workspaces in your MotionLab3 GUI you need to click on the "File" button at the top-left of your screen and then select the save/load operation (green box below) that you want to perform:

Workspaces and configuration files

It is very important to note that a Workspace is a combination of Scope, Display and Control widget settings but this does not include the actual values of all the registers that are selected in these widgets. Therefore, saving a workspace in a file will never store any part of the configuration of the drive in that file and loading a workspace file will never change the configuration currently stored in the drive. In the same way, a configuration file never contains any workspace information.