Getting Started

Welcome to SmallSOCC, a simple gui for commanding an arduino based linear stepper hardware over a serial interface.

Dependencies

Python package dependencies are handled during setup or can be installed manually using pip install <package-name> (see setup.py for up-to-date dependencies)

Installation

clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ryanneph/SmallSOCC.git
cd SmallSOCC

then install using pip:

python -m pip install .

finally run with:

smallsocc

or run directly with:

python smallsocc/gui.py

Development

When installed as a development package, changes to the source code will be immediately reflected the next time smallsocc is run, without requiring a re-installation.

First clone the repository as before, then install:

python -m pip install -e .

It is encouraged to install into a virtualenv rather than your default python dist:

python -m pip install virtualenv
virtualenv soc_dev && source soc_dev/bin/activate
python -m pip install -e .

Developing for the Hardware Microcontroller

Install PlatformIO IDE
or, PlatformIO cli:

sudo python -m pip install -U platformio

Then initialize the development environment, build the code, and flash it to the device

cd soc_driver
pio init -b <board-id>
pio run --target upload

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Addendum

Platform Considerations

Communicating with serial ports is a bit different on windows and linux.

In linux, serial ports are accessed using virtual file-like descriptors that typically show as /dev/ttyACMx or /dev/ttyUSBx.

In windows, serial devices are assigned to a COMx ports instead. All of this should be relatively opaque since the PySerial package provides a convenient way to list all accessible serial ports regardless of the system.

Every attempt has been made to automatically detect the correct serial device on startup, but if manual specification is necessary, you may feed the your usb hardware ID as an argument to the device initialization function HWSOC(8, HID=<xxxx:xxxx>) in VID:PID format. You can view the detected devices and their HIDs by inspecting the command line warnings after a failure to connect.