About Binarus

Hi @Yvonne_  Thank you very much for your your reply. Your input has been invaluable, because since then I at least knew that it should work as I thought. Yes, both the ethercat_master and the slaves had been in the OP state, and the drive systems had shown "Ab" in their display. But whatever I did, the drive systems had not accepted any process data I had sent to them, neither via the REST API nor via the web UI. I also had tried to change the master control word in the parameter editor in Drive Engineering, but that didn't work either. While the web UI had shown the new value for fractions of a second, I believe that this was due to a glitch in the UI and that the drive system had not accepted the new value at all, not even during a small time span. In the meantime, I have found out the cause of the problem: Originally, somebody had installed the PLC app and the Motion app in addition to the ethercat_master app. It had been clear to me that those apps probably would prevent me from using the rest API as intended, so I had disabled them. Obviously, that was not enough: There were still entries in the scheduler related to them. Even uninstalling (in addition to disbling) them didn't solve the problem. Then I decided to become radical and deleted every entry in the scheduler except the one where this isn't possible. Of course, the ethercat_app didn't work afterwards, but it was easy to add it back to the scheduler. This finally made the drive systems accept process data. At least, it was working via Web UI last Friday. I haven't tried via REST yet, because it was already later in the evening, but I'm convinced that it now will work via REST as well. So the cause of the problem was that disabling the PLC and Motion app left inappropriate entries in the scheduler configuration, and that these entries even survived uninstalling the apps. Without your reply, I would have been unsure whether the REST API and the Web UI should work the way I imagined, and probably wouldn't have looked into the scheduler configuration. Again, thank you very much! Best regards, and have a nice week! ... View more

Thanks for your help. FYI, the link suddenly was working correctly yesterday; I guess that was due to actions at your side. But today it fails again (just tried, same problem as two days ago).   ... View more

Hi @nickH, thank you very much for your reply. However, if I click the link you gave, the browser is redirected to   https://docs.automation.boschrexroth.com/doc/0/not-found/latest/iv/   and consequently the website that appears is nearly empty and does not contain something useful. In the meantime, I have found the documentation for C# and for Python myself. The version for C# is at https://apps.boschrexroth.com/docs/ctrlx/csharp/html/. I find it nearly unusable, because there are no explanations about functions and their parameters, but at least it's a starting point where available classes are listed. May I suggest that you place a link to it prominently on your Github site? It's the first thing developers need, but developers are generally not very delighted about having to work out class hierarchies, API functions etc. from header files or sample programs 😁 It would also be nice if you could add documentation like the one under the above link for the other available programming languages as well, especially for C++. The lack of API documentation had nearly made us dump the CtrlX in favor of other products. I doubt that I'll be able to write a first app within a few days as required ... but let's see how it goes. In every case, your company would do itself a favor if somebody took the effort to raise the quality of the documentation to the level of typical Linux API manpages, e.g., https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/printf.3.html (random example; compare it with the documentation of any arbitrary function of your SDK, e.g., ReadAsync() (https://apps.boschrexroth.com/docs/ctrlx/csharp/html/interfaceDatalayer_1_1IClient.html#aecf60d662474f91ec2223c9d7801ddc6)). Apart from the catastrophic (nearly non-existent) API documentation, I find the overall approach of the CtrlX system and the development environment very good. Cross-compiling in VMs that are operated via SSH is a good idea, given that your recommended editor (VS Code) handles that without problems, and given that most developers are using VS Code anyway (at least for minor tasks, if not for their main job). Best regards, Binarus ... View more