Introduction: Installing OrcaWave

Installation

OrcaWave can be installed and run on any computer that has a 64 bit edition of Windows 10 or 11. Diffraction calculations can be demanding on PC resources, so a powerful computer should be used if one is available. Hardware recommendations for OrcaWave are included in the advice published for OrcaFlex, which can be viewed at https://www.orcina.com/support/hardwarerequirements/.

OrcaWave is installed by the OrcaFlex installation program. If you have any difficulty with installation, please contact Orcina or your Orcina agent.

Orcina shell extension

When you install OrcaWave, the Orcina shell extension is also installed. This integrates with Windows Explorer and associates the data and results file types (.owd and .owr) with OrcaWave. You can then open an OrcaWave file by simply double-clicking the filename in Explorer. The shell extension also provides file properties information, such as which version of OrcaWave wrote the file.

Dongles

OrcaWave is supplied with a dongle, a small hardware device that must be connected to the machine or to the network to which the machine is connected.

Note:

The dongle is effectively your licence to run one copy (or more, if the dongle is enabled for more copies) of OrcaWave. It is, in essence, what you have purchased or leased, and it should be treated with appropriate care and security. If you lose your dongle you cannot run OrcaWave.

Warning:

We will replace a damaged or faulty dongle with a new one, but only if the old dongle is returned to us.

Dongles are USB devices which can be plugged into the machine which runs OrcaWave ("local mode"), or (other than old ones labelled Hnnn) can be hosted on a server ("network mode") and accessed over a network by OrcaWave on client machines, allowing OrcaWave to be shared by multiple users. In the latter case, the dongle should be installed by your network administrator; instructions can be found in the OrcaDongle help. By default, dongles can hold up to 10 licences; we can supply them with larger capacities on request.

The dongle requires a device driver to be installed on any machine to which it is connected. Windows will usually do this installation automatically for you when you plug in the dongle; alternatively, you can choose to install the device driver when you install OrcaWave.

Dongle troubleshooting

We supply a dongle utility program called OrcaDongle. If OrcaWave cannot find the dongle then OrcaDongle may be used to check that the dongle is working correctly and has the expected number of licences. You can download an installer for OrcaDongle from www.orcina.com/support/licencesupport/.

Users of network dongles may find the Orcina licence monitor to be useful. This application monitors the OrcaWave licences claimed on a network at any time and reports which machines and users are claiming licences for the various Orcina programs.

Diagnostics

If OrcaWave fails to start, with the error that it cannot obtain a licence, then please check the following.

If you are using a network dongle, are all the licences in use? The Orcina licence monitor may be of use in determining this. If they are, you will need to wait until a licence becomes free before you can run OrcaWave.
If you are using a local dongle, is it plugged into your machine? If so, is the dongle device driver installed? You can check this by running OrcaDongle. If the driver is not present, you can follow the link on our website to download the latest driver software from the dongle manufacturer.
Does the dongle you are using have an OrcaWave licence on it? Again, you can check this with OrcaDongle.
Do you have a licence file for the dongle you wish to access? This file will be named *.lic (where * is the dongle number) and will be in the OrcaWave installation folder.

If none of these help, then please contact us at Orcina with a description of the problem. Ideally, please also email to us the diagnostics file named OrcLog.txt which OrcaWave will have written on failing to find a licence. This file can be found in the folder %appdata%\Orcina\OrcaWave. To open this folder, select Start menu | Run… (or Windows key and 'R') and enter this folder name including the % characters.