Using Windows PowerCube test software

Quick walkthrough on how to use the powercube software on reventlov XP to test the arm.

1. Turn on the software. It should be on the desktop.
2. Make sure your arm is plugged in and the E-stop is off.
3. There should now be a little window on your screen with a textbox on the left and a column of buttons on the right.
4. Press scan. There should now be a list of modules in the textbox. If there are none:
   1. Press "options".
   2. Set the initstring to ESD:devicenum,1000, where devicenum is the set of modules you want to test. On the arms, this should be 0 for the bottom four joints and 1 for the top three.
   3. Try scanning again. If that didn't work, try again with ESD:devicenum,250.
   4. If that worked, panic, because something's horribly broken.
5. Now that you have modules detected, the task is to begin messing with them, right?
6. Hit the button marked "Test".
7. You should now have a new window with a whole bunch of stuff on it.
8. Quick rundown of stuff:
   • In the upper-left you have some tabs which will select which module to look at.
   • Immediatly below that you have some basic diagnostic info about the selected module
   • Below that you have your input panel.
   • • Home, reset, halt, and softstop are pretty self-explanatory. Halt is actually a software E-Stop command that kills every module solidly.
     • The dropbox below that is what action to perform. Again, basically self-explanatory.
     • Move executes, current 0 sets the current on the module to zero.
     • The edit boxes below that are for entering parameters for the actions described in the dropbox. For example, the position command takes a target, the desired velocity to move at, and the acceleration used to reach that velocity and then decelerate.
   • I'm not sure what the digital I/O panel is for.
   • Over on the right you have some cool stuff.
   • The textbox in the middle-right describes the state that the arm is currently in.
   • Under that, you have a bunch of checkboxes. Every checkbox corresponds to a single sensor channel for that module. Quick list:
   • • State: state of the arm
     • Position: Duh
     • DeltaPos: some raw velocity measurement, I think. Possibly also a measure of accuracy.
     • Velocity: duh
     • IPolVel: your guess is as good as mine.
     • Current: shows the instantaneous current consumption by that single module.
     • MotorCur: somehow related to current; other than that, we're not entirely sure.
     • MotorSup: I think that this is current motor voltage.
     • LogicSup: Again, I think that this is voltage to the logic supply.
     • Temperatur: I suspect that this is meant to read "temperature". Read in celsius right now, although you can change it to fahrenehit if you go completely insane.
     • MaxPWM: Not really any idea. I know what a PWM is, but I'm not sure what the max would mean.
     • SimTemp: no idea.
     • MsgTime(ms): Not completely sure. Round trip syn/ack time from the selected module?
     • Get Inc. Values: No idea.
     • Act/Min/Max: set to displaying the selected option. Each module has its own min/max log.
     • Clear MIN/MAX: duh.
     • WriteLog and File are probably for saving logs.

   And that's it.
   
   
   Now on to more useful stuff. If you click the button marked "edit", or you select module-edit from the menubar on the test window, you'll get to a page with dozens of configuration settings for the module. These are basically self-explanatory. You can either write these changes to eeprom (permanent), or save them temporarily (for testing).