Is MCS over network supported?

[erik-mansson]

I and my colleague thougth PyMoDAQ seems interesting to try out, and we wanted to start with a SmarAct MCS linear stage controller for which there was this plugin available.

However, although SmaraAct's configurator software can connect, if we create a preset with the PyMoDAQ smaract plugin it fails to initialize (no error message shown on the first click, on second click a hard crash with QThread mentioned on the console -- didn't save details for now).

After a bit of digging into the code, we have two questions:

1. Is connection to SmarAct MCS via network (IP-number) supposed to work? We have example code from SmarAct which shows that their driver's listing of connected devices only finds those on USB. If you use network you need to specify the address in a string to connect (e.g. what you call controller_locator).

2. The preset we created seems to have the four parameters defined at the start of daq_move_SmarAct.py. However, daq_move_SmarActMCS.py and daq_move_SmarActMCS2.py define a different set of parameters which we don't se in the GUI or the XML configuration file. For instance the controller_locator parameter where we would need to enter the IP-number. So far I haven't been able to find any logic that based on available devices decides whether the SmarAct, SmarActMCS or SmarActMCS2 become visible/used. Can you enlighten me on what conditions would make SmarActMCS usable?

[seb5g]

Hi
glad to hear you're going to try and use PyMoDAQ. As it is now, the Smaract MCS wrapper returns only sytems connected via USB but this can be changed easily in the get_controller_locators method, see below

1. The developer of this plugin had only a usb one, hence the USB only detection. I would suggest you try to change this and see if this works in your case. Then you'll see if you can control the stage with the rest of the code as it is.

2. the 3 smaract plugin controls 3 different type of controllers namely SCU, MCS and MCS2. Pick the one corresponding to your controller first and see how to list all connection (even TCP/IP see above)

Comes back here if needed :-)

[rgeneaux]

Hi Erik,

Thanks for raising this issue, indeed we have no controllers over network so we didn't check for that yet. But I think we need to take care of it since Smaract stages are used by a lot of people.

Unfortunately, as you noted, a look at the library shows that the SA_CTL_FindDevices method provided by smaract only detects devices over USB. In turn, since no devices were found, PyMoDAQ hides all of the plugins (daq_move_SmarAct, daq_move_SmarActMCS, daq_move_SmarActMCS2) in the daq_move.
It's a pretty easy change to add an IP address in the parameters of the plugins, as well as a dropdown list to choose between USB or Ethernet communication, and change the initialization function.

If I do the change, will you test it out? I do'nt have the hardware to test it myself.

Cheers
Romain