How to create an HMI Report on a B&R PC

[rafael.laury]

Introduction

The B&R ADI Driver contains several functions that can be useful in troubleshooting and diagnostics. One of these features is called HMI Report, which is a simple tool that can be used to pull diagnostic data from a B&R PC running a GPOS (Windows or Linux).

There are several output formats of the HMI Report you can collect:

• HTML Report (HTML) - Report in HTML format for display in the browser.

• Text Report (TXT) - Report in text format for display in the text editor.

• XML Report (XML) - Report in XML format for display in the browser.

• Diagnostic package (ZIP) - The diagnostic package contains a text report and log files for troubleshooting by B&R.

When troubleshooting an issue with a B&R PC, it is often requested by L1 and L2 Support to collect an HMI Report (usually a diagnostic package in .zip / .tar.gz format) from the PC and send it in for further analysis. The steps to do this on a B&R PC running Windows or Linux are described in the next section.

Steps in Windows

The steps in this section show how to collect diagnostics from a B&R HMI (e.g. APC or PPC) in Windows 11 (it is the same procedure in Windows 10).

The only software pre-requisite is to have the ADI Driver installed, which it should already be if using a B&R Windows image.

You will need the following hardware to complete this procedure:

• Automation Panel or DVI/Display Port connected monitor
• USB keyboard (recommended)
• USB mouse (recommended)
• USB stick on which to save the extracted report to complete this procedure.

To collect the HMI diagnostics package from HMI Report in ZIP format, follow these steps:

1. In the Windows Start menu, search for “HMI Report” and open it.

   

2. In the HMI Report pop-up that comes up, in the “Report” field, change the file extension from the default “.html” to “.zip” and then select “OK”.

   

3. The .zip Diagnostics report package will then be created. It could take a few minutes to complete.

   

4. Once it is finished, you should find the completed ZIP folder in the path specified (Documents by default). Note that the name of the package is the APC/PPC chipset followed by the serial number.
   

   

5. You have successfully created an HMI Report in Windows! Copy this ZIP folder onto a USB drive to get it onto your laptop and send it to your local B&R support for further troubleshooting.

In the example above, a ZIP diagnostics package is collected as this is the most complete type of HMI Report, however the steps are the same for HTML, TXT and XML formats, you just need to adjust the file ending accordingly in Step 2. The same is true for the Linux HMI Report.

Steps in Linux (GUI)

The HMI Report tool comes pre-installed in B&R Linux 10 and 12. There are two options to run the HMI Report: “hmi-report” (CLI) and “hmi-report-gui” (GUI program), as written in the B&R Online Help :

Here are the steps to collect the HMI Report from a B&R PC running Linux 10 or 12 using the “GUI” (Graphical User Interface) option. This procedure is very similar to the steps for Windows.

1. In the Linux App Launcher, search for “HMI Report” and open it.

   

2. Once it opens, for the “Report type”, select “Diagnostics package”.

   

3. You should see that the “Save to” path updates to use the “.tar.gz” extension. If desired, you can change the location where the file should be stored and the file name. Then select “Save” to start the HMI Report collection.

   

4. Depending on the permissions of your user, you may be asked to authenticate to complete the HMI Report process. If so, enter your password and hit “OK”.

   

5. The Diagnostics package should have been created and can be found at the “Save to” location (in this case on the Desktop).

   

6. You have successfully created an HMI Report in Linux using the HMI Report GUI! Copy this .tar.gz archive onto a USB drive to get it onto your laptop and send it to your local B&R support for further troubleshooting.

Steps in Linux (CLI)

The other method to collect an HMI Report from a B&R PC running B&R Linux is using the HMI Report CLI (command-line interface). This is useful as it does not require access to the Linux desktop (which needs USB keyboard, mouse and HDMI monitor connection), but rather it can be done directly through the Console through an SSH connection. The resulting HMI Report can then be exported using tools like FileZilla or WinSCP.

Here are the steps to collect an HMI Report from a Linux PC using the “hmi-report” CLI:

1. Open a Console on the PC (either directly on the PC with a monitor and keyboard, or via SSH) and check that you have “hmi-report” installed by running the following command: sudo hmi-report --help

   
   1. You should see the same output as above.
   2. If you get an error saying that you do not have this package installed, you may be using a non-B&R Linux distribution and therefore the package is not pre-installed. Please see the Resources section below for a link to download the HMI Report package, and then install it onto your PC.

2. If necessary, navigate to the directory where you want to save the HMI report using cd.

3. Execute the following command to collect the HMI Report diagnostics package in “.tar.gz” format (replacing “” with the desired name for the HMI Report): sudo hmi-report --verbose 3 --format tar --output <NAME>.tar.gz

   

4. Once it finishes, you should see “Progress: Completed report creation” in the output, and it should return to the command line.

   

5. If you run an ls command, you should see your HMI Report in the current directory.
   

6. You have successfully created an HMI Report in Linux using the HMI Report CLI! Copy this .tar.gz archive onto a USB drive to get it onto your laptop, or use a tool like FileZilla or WinSCP if this was done using an SSH connection, and send it to your local B&R support for further troubleshooting.

Resources

For more information on the HMI report, you can find more details in the ADI Driver User’s Manual (for Windows 10 and 11) or in the B&R Linux User’s Manual (for Linux 10 and 12):

• ADI driver User's Manual | B&R Industrial Automation
• Linux for B&R 10 user's manual | B&R Industrial Automation
• Linux for B&R 12 User's manual | B&R Industrial Automation

If you are using a non-B&R distribution of Linux, you will need to install the HMI Report package separately. These can be downloaded from the B&R website at these links (login required!):

• Login | B&R Industrial Automation (Linux 10)
• Login | B&R Industrial Automation (Linux 12)

The below general information on the HMI Report for Windows can be found in the Automation Help ( B&R Online Help ):

Additional information for the HMI Report in Linux can be found at the below Automation Help page ( B&R Online Help ):

[rafael.laury]

Updated post to include procedure for B&R Linux 10 and 12 (using GUI and CLI), and added some more Resources.