ElectroCraft Motor/Drive Interface Using a Serial Port, C#, .NET, and MVVM

This is a collection of C# code to communicate with ElectroCraft brand motors and drives, and get all that stuff to an MVVM .NET application.

Motivation

ElectroCraft just cannot produce a simple interface control doc, one describing the messages between drives and the external world.

Mostly, ElectroCraft will say:

• "Take your drive control code."
• "Use the drive code development environment."
• "Use the debug interface to see what bits-n-bytes go back & forth."
• "Put the bits-n-bytes in your code."

That's crap. Here's how to get around it.

Assumptions

• Assumes your axises are daisy-chained using CAN
• One drive is the CAN master
• Your serial port is connected to the CAN master
• The .NET SerialPort class is used
• Your application is follows a C#, Model View View Model pattern.

Crafting Your ElectroCraft Drive Code

ElectroCraft's design studio is all about stitching together ElectroCraft motion- and motor-control code with your custom control data.

Here's some tips.

Make It Look Like IO Ports & Registers

Getting to your custom control data can be quite confusing. There's an easy way to do it:

• Define your custom control data.
• Define the data as going in-to/out-of IO ports and registers in the drive.
• Assign drive memory addresses to these ports and registers.

By doing that:

• Data is accessed by a unique combo of axis and memory address
• It's either a 32- or 16-bit data read/write.

Make Your Drive Code React To Changes to Ports & Registers

Just like controlling a chip on a board.

Dealing With Axis On/Off and Drive Reset Become Simple Instructions

And that's a simple exception to the rules; it's easy to handle.

Take Advantage of What's Here to Structure Communications

There's two aggregate namespaces here.

ECFundies

This namespace contains classes you're actually use. Good thing to keep in a seperate namespace.

ECPutItTogether

This example put's it together.

Collaborators.txt Is Your Friend

This is a quick run-down of who's important to what in this system.

Finally: Learn MVVM aka Model View View Model Pattern

Writing a .NET app following MVVM is best described as a cliff:

• Go to the edge of the cliff.
• Fall off the cliff.
• Climb back up.
• Learn a lot, going down and comping back up.

Microsoft has several tutorials on this subject. Study 'em.

License

MIT, as always. Just gimme credit.

Tools

Developed using Mono 5.10 and Microsoft Visuald Studio.

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