Geo Brick Drive - Collecting register data over USB, Ethernet, or Serial.

[cmisztur]

I have several machines with Geo Brick drives where I need to collect register data near real time.  Currently the PC running custom HMI is connected to the drive over USB.  I can't seem to find a definite answer in the docs (yet), so I thought to ask it here.

Can I create a separate .NET 3.5 application on the same PC and create a secondary connection, through PCommServer, for my purposes to the same drive?

Can I make an ethernet connection while USB connection is in use?  If so, is this a straight ASCII exchange or do I need to go through PCommServer libraries?

Finally, does the RS232 serial port support straight ASCII command-response exchange, without additional libraries (so that I could run my code on a Linux box)?

 

Thank You

Chris

Edited August 3, 2022 by cmisztur

[steve.milici]

The USB and Ethernet port use the same “host address” in PMAC so you can’t communicate simultaneously.

 

The serial port is just standard PMAC ASCII communication and is separate from the above “host port”. The scheme you suggest should work well. A Geo Brick serial port should be able to run at 115KBAUD.

 

You could setup data gathering in PMAC to get a high “data capture” rate, but you will need to parse the uploaded ASCII character data back to numeric values. See the “Turbo PMAC User Manual” in the section “Data Gathering” for a description of the data format and conversion techniques. Specifically see the section “Data Format”

 

[cmisztur]

Thanks Steve.  Which manual references "PMAC ASCII" ?

[steve.milici]

The term "PMAC ASCII" just refers to the syntax documented in the “Turbo PMAC/PMAC2 Software Reference” manual.