Terminal++ for Robot Researcher Using C#

Abstract

Purpose: Sometimes our robot researcher needs a terminal program to exchange the data with the robot or automation device. Nevertheless, the readily available terminal program lacks some functionality that is most relevant to the researcher. We feel that a featured rich terminal program can handle lots of communication overhead for the researcher and relieve them from repetitive and time-consuming tasks. In mind for this, we researched and developed a utility program. We added extra features like automatic send, change dynamic data, etc., so our robot researcher can test the system communication better. In this paper, we demonstrated the utility program in detail. It is built using C#, which is under the Microsoft dot net framework. The code is uploaded to GitHub. Anyone can download and use it. It can be customized for their need. All used classes are available in .cs format.

Design/Methodology/Approach:  This is the software utility program built by the dot net framework of Microsoft visual studio. It has a graphical user interface (GUI) and some object classes. It has a serial and ethernet interface to test the channel.  Once the medium is selected, the application will send whatever is written in the input text box. The Data sending may be an automatic or manual process. In manual mode, after typing the command, we need to press the “Enter” key to send the data. In automatic mode, it will send automatically within the preset interval. The transmit and receive content is displayed inside the list box.

Findings/results: sometimes, our project goes into a critical phase. We need to have good tools to overcome the situation immediately. This is a helpful tool to trace the communication-related issue. Using this tool, we can observe the outgoing and incoming data traffic. The robot researcher can use it for their communication-related debug purposes. 

Originality/Value:  Using this terminal program, our robot researcher will get lots of benefits where readily available utility programs cannot provide them. It has some unique features like automatic sending, changing dynamic content, etc. It has a serial and ethernet interface channel so that most of the device communication can be debugged through this interface software. It is entirely free and open source. Anyone can download and use it for personal as well as commercial purposes.

Paper Type: Experiment-based Research.