Added a serial-over-socket interface

[toqduj]

I have a TMCM board connected to a machine network via an ethernet-to-serial converter. These take socket connections and pass them on to the RS232 or (in my case) RS485 serial port.

I found some old code in an abandoned branch on here, polished it up, and made it resemble the structure of the serial and socketcan connections. Given that someone else went down the same rabbit-hole a while ago, and since connecting motor controllers to a TCP/IP network like this is quite common in my experience, it might be of use to someone else.

It has been tested with the following code block:

import pytrinamic
from pytrinamic.connections import ConnectionManager
from pytrinamic.modules import TMCM6214
import time
pytrinamic.show_info()
connectionManager=ConnectionManager("--interface socket_serial_tmcl --port 192.168.0.253:4016 --host-id 3 --module-id 0")
with connectionManager.connect() as myInterface:
    module = TMCM6214(myInterface)
    motor_0 = module.motors[0]
    print(motor_0.get_position_reached())

[toqduj]

p.s. this works better if the module_id is 1. If set to zero, PyTrinamic does not communicate well.

[trinamic-bp]

Hi @toqduj, thank you for your PR and the effort you put into it. We are packed with work at the moment, but can hopefully soon find some time to look into this.

[toqduj]

hey @trinamic-bp, looking forward to seeing this in main. I've built a library to expose the motor control boards over the EPICS Channel-Access virtual communications interface, commonly found at large science facilities such as synchrotrons and neutron sources (see: https://github.com/BAMresearch/Trinamic_TMCM6214_TMCL_IOC ).
I hope the takeover by Maxim / Analog Devices does not mean that the support and development of these boards will disappear soon, they're amazing boards.

[trinamic-bp]

With Maxim and Analog Devices we are definitely more careful about copyright and IP rights. As the basis of your work was already code from Trinamic, you are probably fine if we add the Trinamic/Analog Devices copyright notice at the tope of the "pytrinamic/connections/socket_tmcl_interface.py" file?

[toqduj]

yes, that's fine by me. I didn't spend too much time on it, but it has been working well for the past few weeks of testing on two of our systems. Here's hoping for native ethernet interfaces on your future boards!