Has anybody ever managed to use this Serial USB Andon Stack Light with Tulip before?
Amazon.com: ANDONT USB 3-Stack LED Andon Tower Signal Light with Buzzer for Workstations, Industrial, 5VDC, IP53 Rated, Plug-and-Play : Industrial & Scientific
It uses a CH340 serial chip and accepts hex commands to trigger light change events via 9600 baud Serial.
Hello,
My team also attempted to use the same Andon light using the serial device in Tulip and didn’t have too much luck.
First issue we ran into was that as soon as the Tulip Player was started it would get a hold of the com port the Andon was connected to and we were unable to connect. We found that connecting to the com port using another tool before opening the Tulip player would prevent Tulip from getting possession of the port. Then we could disconnect from the tool and connect in the Tulip player.
The next issue we found was actually sending commands to the the Andon light. Since the serial device function only accepts a string we attempted to send the string \u{00A0}\u{0001}\u{0001}\u{00A2} in order to send the correct bytes to Andon light. After some testing using the console we found out that the strings were being encoded using UTF-8 this essentially meant it was impossible to send the bytes we needed.
The next step we took was to create a custom driver using the Edge Driver SDK. This worked well the driver was pretty simple to create we were able to get the light to function.
Hope this helps!
(All done on Player version 2.11.0)
Ran into the same exact problem and solution as above^ Nice explanation @dhojnowski !
Tulip Serial Driver can’t send bytes, only text strings. Which was a requirement for this to work.
But if you work with Tulip Support you can set up a custom driver using their SDK.