I wanted something which would let me create test commands for my Pololu devices quickly, so I wrote a small utility with preset commands for the Maestro and Qik devices (the two I currently own) and some tools for converting integers to 7-bit words and for working with ShiftBrites.
Apparenty the original publish ened up with a blank copy of the commands.xml file which contains the pre-programmed Qik and Maestro commands. Not sure how that happened, but anyway it has been corrected.
If you have already installed the program, please uninstall it from the Windows Control Panel then download “rev 1” from the original link and resinstall the application.
As of this posting, the deployment package located at the above link contains the proper commands.xml file.
Thank you for writing this and sharing it with us. It certainly looks very polished. I’m out of the office on vacation this week, but I’ll try it out when I get back. It looks like this could be a good resource to point people to in addition to our Serial Transmitter Utility.
The program may look more polished than it actually is, lol. With little more definition than a simple program to quickly send pages of command bytes, this has definately been an evolving project!
I’ve kept the app in beta since there is still plenty of room for testing, bug squashing, and general improvement. I still need to add the option to insert CRC bytes (easy with the command builder, but will take a little more thought to work well in the general editor), and may decide to rearrange the interface as the toolset grows. The little help file included needs to be updated with some of the lastest features as well.
I’d be happy to make this available as a “option-filled” alternative to your existing Serial Transmitter Utility. And as I mentioned in the initial post, I could write the project as a tutorial on interfacing with the devices in VB. But I guess the real question is how much inquiry do you receive from the .Net community? Are there enough .Net folks asking questions to make the project tutorial worthwhile?
Anyway, hope you had a wonderful holiday and I look forward to any feedback after you’ve had a chance to play around with the program.
