Talking to Machines

Update 2017: Microchip now has a Qt 5 example in their MLA folder "apps\usb\device\bootloaders\utilities". It uses the popular HIDAPI by Alan Ott / Signal 11.   It makes the below approach obsolete , and I really recommend to download and check out the Microchip MLA package instead. ============================================== While working on a Microchip PIC32 based USB HID Composite Device for our Kickdrive environment, we realized the need for updating the PIC application firmware from our own UI, instead of using an external tool.  Firmware updates for any Embedded device or accessory are an essential part of product support and should be done in the least disrupting way. So even launching an external Windows command line tool did not look like a good solution to us. What I found was Microchip's own sample code  from  Application Note AN1388 , but the PIC32UBL.exe code was MFC / Visual Studio 2003 and not designed to be anything else th...

My recent project work included applications with a servo drive controller that offers a simple text-based protocol via TCP. We many times explain this to our clients as the fastest way to integrate the drive, especially if their part is a standalone Windows software project that does not already have any fieldbus communications up and running.  But to our own surprise, discussions went frequently like this: “We recommend the direct TCP interface - this is so much easier than adding extra Ethercat or Profinet equipment for this purpose.“ “Yes, but how does TCP work? ” “Easy. Just open a TCP client connection to the drive controller, and send these simple ASCII commands.” “Yes, but I have no idea about TCP connections. Don’t you have a simple DLL for this?” So we decided to help out and make a DLL indeed. Not one that implements the servo controller interface, but a simplistic and generic way of processing text-based protocols and dealing with the TCP socket connection. And I ...