Tutorial Day 3 Conclusion

Congratulations! Your driver is now more than half-way finished. In the lessons to follow we will focus on a feature of the Niagara AX framework and of the dev driver framework called auto-discovery.

In the lessons so far, you added a network component to your test station. Then you added a device component to your network and some control point components to your device.

To add your device, you double-clicked the network component. Then you clicked New from the Ddf Device Manager. After that, you visited the property sheet for your device and specified the proper values for the deviceId (possibly also the Tcp/Ip address and port -- if applicable).

To add your control points, you double-clicked the point device extension component under your device. Then you clicked New from the Ddf Point Manager. After that, you specified the proper values for the readParameters, writeParameters, and pointId structures on your control points.

This required that you, yourself, know the exact information necessary to identify the device and the control points.

Wouldn't it be much better if your station could automatically query your field-bus and find these for you? It usually can! In tomorrow's lesson, we will show you what to do to your driver to make this happen.