Motion Control and Motor Drives

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Reading variables/parameters from stpper motor controller

I have three Pacific Scientific stepper motors and controllers. The controllers are programmable via a proprietary version of the basic programming language, called stepperbasic. I can control the motors using labview by performing a serial write function, and outputting an ASCII string to the controllers, for example 'GO.VEL', starts the motor moving. However i am unsure how i can read parameters from the controllers. For example there is a variable 'MOVING', this is logic 0 if the motor is not moving and 1 if the motor is moving. How can i get labview to read this variable and others like it?
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Thank for contacting National Instruments. From the sounds of your system, this post may be better aimed at our GPIB/Serial group rather than the Motion team. If the only communication you have with these controllers is through serial communication, then most likely you will need to use a serial read (or possibly the I/O Assistant if you are using LabVIEW 7.x) in order to pull in that information. I am not the expert here on serial, but for this you will need to know what commands to send to get this information out and then what type of data you are expecting.

Another option that you can look into is if Pacific Scientific included a C/C++ library, then you may be able to call that dll or code from within LabVIEW to control the controllers/motors also. If you hav
e not done so already, I would take a look at the documentation for your hardware and see what software came with it. If they provided anything that could be used to write a basic C/C++ program to control the motor, then you should be able to do the same from within LabVIEW.

I hope this helps out some and let us know if you have any more specific questions.

Regards,
Michael
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
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