Image Vault

The Image Vault

The image vault is a method of storing all of your media images in a compressed form on the SD card so that they can be loaded as a single file and then expanded in memory. This speeds up loading of a more complex cluster design because the time taken to open and read many small files can be significantly longer than the time taken to open and read one large file, even though the cumulative content is the same.

Use of the image vault is optional, and likely not necessary for simple cluster designs.

Manual generation of the image vault is now deprecated, as you can generate it using the SDC tools application. The process below still works but you’re better off using the SDC Tools application to do it.

TL;DR for Experts

Open the SDC console via putty
Enter the commands in the sequence below

Speedy Digital Cluster (SDC) Version 1.0 Telnet Console
 (Type HELP for a list of available commands)
>vault createall
Creating Vault, all images
Compressing Vault
Cleaning up...
Vault Created
>restart
Restarting in 1000 milliseconds
>

Your putty session will be dead at this point - close it and open a new one after the system restarts.

Any images configured as ‘load on demand’ will not be included in the image vault for obvious reasons

If you change the content of your xml file to add new graphical resources then these will still be loaded even if they are not in the vault. However, if you change a file that is in the vault you won’t see the changes unless you update the vault. To update it, simply run the command sequence above again.

Step by Step Image Vault Creation

To use the image vault you must have enabled WIFI and set up Application Console access to your SDC installation.

Once you have access to the console, you can use the ‘vault’ command to create it. Enter

>vault createall

And after a short pause you will see a message:

>vault createall
Creating Vault, all images
Compressing Vault
Cleaning up...
Vault Created
>

To verify that something useful happened, take a look at the directory listing:

>cd media\vault

C:\media\vault>dir
  Directory of C:\media\vault\

 1-1-80                 <DIR>          .
 1-1-80                 <DIR>          ..
 30-12-99 00:05:22            6285552  imagevault.zip
          1 file(s) 6285552 bytes
          2 dir(s)

C:\media\vault>

If you look in the system log, you will then find a series of messages confirming the files that were added to the vault. Here is the command and an extract of the messages;

C:\media\vault>mon 1
Monitoring for 1 seconds.
30-12-99 00:01:03: .
30-12-99 00:02:03: .
30-12-99 00:03:02: The vault will have 64 files in it
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_classicmode.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=17156
30-12-99 00:03:02: image orange_led_square_on.bmp w=63 h=25 bufsize=6300 imageoffset=107156
30-12-99 00:03:02: image orange_led_square_off.bmp w=45 h=17 bufsize=3060 imageoffset=113456
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_sportmode.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=116516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_trackmode.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=206516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_t350dash.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=296516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_nightcluster.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=386516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_choosegroup.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=476516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_cycle.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=566516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_settings.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=656516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image clustericon_new.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=746516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_tripsettings.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=836516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_tpms.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=926516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_charts.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=1016516
30-12-99 00:03:02: image cream_mpg.bmp w=150 h=150 bufsize=90000 imageoffset=1106516

You will of course see a message for every image file in your pages XML.

When the system boots back up again you will need to reconnect using a new putty session. If you issue a mon 1 command and take a look at the beginning of the log (scroll the screen upwards to see earlier lines), then you should see references to the image vault being loaded and decompressed.

30-12-99 00:00:02: Reading 6285552 bytes from the de-compressed vault
30-12-99 00:00:02: Vault file unzipped to memory
30-12-99 00:00:02: image vault loaded; size=6285552 bytes. Entrycount=64

If you see any warnings in the system log that files are being loaded because they are not present in the image vault, this probably means you have added resources to your XML file without recreating your vault. Similarly, as per the note above, if you change images that are already in the vault you must use vault createall again before the changes will be recognised.

While you are developing a cluster, it is probably easiest to just run without an image vault so that you don’t have to keep recreating it whenever you change something. Then once you’re finished you can execute the vault createall just once. To run without an image vault, simply delete all of the files in the vault folder:
c:\>cd \media\vault
c:\>del *.*