Getting Started
Before working with the FrameAlyst the com port has to be specified and maybe other parameters have to be set. This is accomplished by the menu selection Connection->Settings.
 |
With the Active Role the user selects the basic behavior of the FrameAlyst. It may only listen (None) to the stream or it can act as a master (Master), allowing the user to send any frame he wants. In addition it may also act as a simple slave (Slave). Usually the addressing mode is set to 'Long'. If you use addressing mode 'Short' it uses the short address for accessing other commands than 0. If 'Tag Name' is selected as Addressing Mode the device is addressed by it's name which requires to enter the Tag Name.
|
It is important to set the Mode to 'Monitor Frames'. If it is necessary to do some analysis it may be required to switch off the 'Monitor Frames' Mode to allow the selection of frame data for decoding purposes.
Send Any Cmd
Send Any Cmd is one of the most important functions of FrameAlyst. It allows to configure any cmd especially custom specific commands to be sent. The function is invoked by Send->Any Cmd. Before this is active the emulation mode (Connection->Settings) has to be set to Master emulation.
First the command number is entered. If there is no data to be sent with the command the data field is empty.
The result of the example above is the following.
Basically if data has to be sent with a command it has to be specified in kind of a special language. The simplest form is to give comma separated hexadecimal or decimal values each representing one octet of the frame. FrameAlyst will calculate the number of required octets by itself and code the required frame.
The following is a fictive example.
The frame produced by these settings would look like the following.
Hexadecimal and decimal expression can be mixed. Therefore the following specification of the frame would produce the same result.
Anyhow, it is possible to produce more complex expressions by providing a prefix to the value. The prefix and the value are also comma separated. The table below is showing the possible prefixes. It does not play a role whether the prefix is in capital letters or not.
| Prefix | Meaning | Syntax | Comment |
| dec8 | Decimal Value 0..255 | dec8,120 | |
| dec16 | Decimal Value 0..65535 | dec16,10000 | |
| dec24 | Decimal Value 0..16777215 | dec24,100000 | |
| dec32 | Decimal Value 0..4294967295 | dec32,100000001 | |
| hex8 | Hex Value 0..FF | hex8,ab | |
| hex16 | Hex Value 0..FFFF | hex16,abc | |
| hex24 | Hex Value 0..FFFFFF | hex24,abcdef | |
| hex32 | Hex Value 0..FFFFFFFF | hex32,1abcdef2 | |
| float | Float Value IEEE 754 | float,0.1234 | Be sure to use '.' as decimal separator |
| pcaNN | Packed ASCII of Length NN | pca8,WALTER | If a space is entered in front of a string it is treated as a space. If the text is entered in " it is treated as is. |
| strNN | String of Length NN | str8,walter |
The example above can also be realized by:
Entering the following example
Will produce the following frame.
Analysing the packed ASCII string
produces this result.
And the float value was coded in the next four octets.
As the decoder is reporting it.
Handling of Strings
When entering a string usually tailing spaces are supressed.
The above specification results in a text to be sent with underscores at the end.
If you use the following specification:
the spaces at the end are used.
Packed ASCII
A packed ASCII string is specified as 'pcaNN' with NN being the size of the packed string. Example:
This is a string of 16 characters, But in the communication it requires only 12 bytes.
Examples for Any CMD
This is an example of the specification of a frame for command 18 (Set Tag Descriptor and Date).
This will produce the following frame to be sent.
Decoding the text
results in
The next example is the specification of command 35 (Set Range).
The following screenshot shows the resulting frame.
Note that the first integer 8 value is the unit code, followed by two float numbers for the range.
