Controlling a Tic825 via USB on Win7: Ready to use DLL/Lib/header available?

Support Motor controllers/drivers and motors
1

Hi,
I’m new to the pololu world. I got a Tic825 controller+adequate step motor.
The system works fine with the Tic control center, but this doesn’t help as I need to integrate the controller functions into an existing SW application (written in C using NI LabWindows/CVI).
I searched the Pololu site for a compiled API package but only found links to github (libusbp). I would not say I’m stupid, but I have to say I’m unable to cope with all this stuff. I’m not really “interested” in looking into the sources, I just want to use the package without having to use external, console based compilers. I tried to compile following the hints from the website but struggled.
When buying a product on the market, I’m used to find a compiled API package (DLL,a header file, a lib file) that allows me easily implementing the product features.
I’m sure there are lots of users who already did the compilation and could maybe provide the package to me.
To me it looks much more complicated to create the environment to communicate with the Tic825 than the commands themselves. Any help appreciated, I’m lost here…

Regards

2

Hello.

If you have not done so already, I recommend reading the “Writing PC software to control the Tic” section of the Tic user’s guide. That section briefly outlines four different ways you could approach writing software to control the Tic over USB:

  1. Use the native USB APIs that come with your operating system.
  2. Use a USB abstraction library like libusbp or libusb.
  3. Use libpololu-tic, a C library that our Tic software uses.
  4. Invoke ticcmd, the command-line utility that comes with our software, from your program.

Have you considered invoking ticcmd from your program? You wouldn’t need to compile it because it comes with our pre-built installer for the Tic software. I also think it is the easiest of the four options because you do not need to learn a Tic-specific or USB-specific C API and manage the pointers used by that API.

–David