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Updated:
07/09/2013
Our
Ethernet Software Developers Kit for EBCs, EBC100s, ECOMs, ECOM100s & EDRVs
As part of our federation's effort to provide
best value to the customer, we are providing an Ethernet Software
Development Kit (SDK) for our EBCs, EBC100s, ECOMs, ECOM100s and EDRVs
free of charge. Because of the obvious economic implications of doing so, we
can't provide telephone support for these tools. We have tried to provide
clear documentation and sample applications. We will provide answers to
specific implementation questions via email.
The interface code as a package is written with the
“less is more” philosophy. It is intended to be the minimum layer between
the client application and the I/O interface module. As such, the client
application has the responsibility of initialization, building up I/O
requests, parsing responses, handling error conditions and cleanup when the
client application closes.
Being that our other software products are Win32 applications, the examples
included in our Ethernet SDK are for Microsoft Visual C/C++ and for
Microsoft Visual Basic. However, they should build under any 32-bit compiler
with a few tweaks. As more people convert our SDK to run on platforms, we'll
make them available here. The demonstration programs are included to help
you understand the process of communication with the EBCs, ECOMs and EDRVs.
We will be adding additional documentation files, example code, and other
goodies to the SDK as we learn more about what is required to use our SDK
efficiently. As developers of the products, we sometimes over-simplify some
aspects of communicating with our modules. As we get questions from
developers using our SDK, we will publish FAQs, tip sheets, tables of
information, etc. that address these issues and try to head off some of the
common problems.
Source Code for our Ethernet SDK
For professional software developers who, for legitimate reasons, cannot use
our Ethernet SDK as provided, we will make the source code to the Ethernet
SDK available. Some legitimate reasons are: you’re developing for a
non-Windows environment (UNIX, Linux, etc.), you’re not using Microsoft’s
Visual C/C++ development environment, or you want to include the SDK's APIs
directly into your application and not use the provided DLLs. We will
provide this source code free of charge and will provide assistance in its
use via email.
Along with the Win32
version of the source code, we do have available two customer provided ports
of the source code, one for Linux (RH v8.1) and one for VB.Net v2003
/ 2005.
To request the source code for our
Ethernet SDK, send us an email with the information described below
This document and the
products it represents are a work in progress. We desire your feedback, so
if you have some constructive criticism or enhancement ideas, please don’t
hesitate to send them in. The preferred method of communicating with us
about the Ethernet SDK is via an email sent to
SDKSupport@hosteng.com.
NOTE: Some
of the example programs were built before the Terminator I/O system was
designed. As such, they do not work with the T1H-EBC or T1H-EBC100. The
examples can be made to so do with a few minor changes. The changes are necessary because
Terminator I/O systems can potentially be larger than either 205 or 405
systems. The changes consist of allowing for more bases and slots, and
changing the way we express the amount of I/O data.
Changes are needed
in four areas, they can be summarized as follows:
- BASE
and SLOT are now BYTEs, they used to be 4 bits each
- The
amount of I/O data is expressed as the number of bytes for all
modules
- READIO,
WRITEIO and setup packets must begin with a 'B1 00'
- All
terminator I/O modules are type 7
We've also updated
the 205 and 405 EBC firmware to work with this new packet style. If you
are using mixed EBC systems, you can update the 205 and 405 EBC firmware
and use only one driver for all of our EBCs.
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