Hey Tulip Gurus,
Are there any plans for a digital app companion to be able to test out equipment responses? For instance, could you make an application that responds like a pic-to-light setup? This would be super useful for development purposes so we don’t need to have the actual hardware setup at our desk, we could just have an emulator of the hardware to show if our triggers are working properly for a theoretical setup. This could be as simple as a digital representation of a set of pic-to-lights, or having a dynamic input that is representing a scale.
This would help make everything more cost effective to so we don’t need a twin setup to iterate on for improvements.
Hey @Shrmnatr. Check out this suite in the library, it has a pick to light unit test. This isn’t quite what you’re asking for—it does require the hardware to be plugged in to work—but it is great for testing configurations.
Hey @freedman—how about a pick-to-light test custom widget for the library for testing logic from a desk?
I have a pic to light setup at my desk that works fine for testing my own stuff, but we are bringing several engineers onto the Work Instruction development project and that makes for tight resources at the moment, but in addition it would be nice to be able to create a digital work station that you could configure and test data flow and device function so when we have the stations up and running we dont need extra stations with hardware to continue to develop and improve.
@John@Shrmnatr I think this is a great feature request and I don’t think a custom widget would do the trick. Here’s an example where I ran into the same issue. I wanted to test out an application I was developing for our TEC in Boston, but I am located in North Carolina. The application had a lot of logic around “event at this station” and I just couldn’t test it and access all of the cameras, etc.
One method that I was able to make some progress with was using Test mode and choosing the station I wanted. This might work for you, too, @Shrmnatr , but there are some limitations with Test mode that you may be aware of.
To be a little more clear, the area where this didn’t work for me was when I wanted to test the actual camera and its ability to recognize my hand in a certain region of interest. There was no way for me to trigger it remotely. For this reason, I would love some kind of fake device manager that would let me arbitrarily simulate any device input or output.
@freedman I have worked in test mode, But where my team is increasing and resources are decreasing it is making it tough to introduce trigger logic with real world devices. We are creating a development station for this purpose and standardizing as many of our setups as possible, But I was running into a similar problem you were with the pic-to-light kit where I can say trigger it but I cant tell if my logic works properly. What I would really love is a simulated equipment interface similar to how NI does for their DAQ and other LabVIEW equipment if that makes sense. It would be awesome to set up a fake digital work station environment, it doesn’t have to be crazy realistic but you could create your trigger logic with the digital test environment and then simulate interaction between the digital environment simulating real world devices and the tulip application to make sure things were copesetic.
@John@freedman
Something like this to emulate real world equipment that would allow the user to dynamically test their input logic would be awesome. You could emulate scales, scanners, lights, calipers, sensors, etc.
This would drastically cut down development and v&v timelines. And make integration a breeze.
I am using a barcode scanner set to Serial Output mode to simulate test data from a torque analyzer (I am developing the app in Pennsylvania, Torque Analyzers are in Illinois). Wondering if something similar could be done to emulate output from the pick sensors.
