Terminal

What is the Terminal?

The Terminal is a widget that is used for two different purposes:

To report everything that happens when you perform a test inside the Wizard.
To run Python commands, especially to communicate with and control the drive using the ingeniamotion library.

The next sections explain these two use cases in detail.

Working with the Terminal

Showing Wizard test results

The Terminal is a widget that reports everything that happens during a Wizard test. Every time a “Test“ button is clicked, the Terminal widget opens at the bottom of the screen (see the green rectangle below) and displays a description of all the steps run during the test. This is done for two main reasons:

To provide full visibility into the steps that the test is running.
To easily understand the source of any problem if a particular test fails.

Running Python commands with the Terminal

The Terminal can also be used as a Python command prompt to run commands or short scripts. To open the Terminal, click the following button in the toolbar:

When the Terminal opens, a Python console starts:

Using command prompts to interact with the drive

Ingeniamotion is an open-source Python library used to facilitate the interaction with Novanta Servo drives. The use of the library is optional, but if you would like to use it, you can find the detailed documentation here: Welcome to ingeniamotion’s documentation!.

Once a drive is connected, the mc (MotionController) object can be used to call ingeniamotion functions.

For example, enabling the motor can be done by calling an ingeniamotion function in the motion namespace:

CODE

mc.motion.motor_enable()

When opening the function’s parentheses, a short documentation is shown.

Note that the function’s arguments and outputs are shown, along with a short description.

For complete documentation of all functions, and to get to know ingeniamotion, please refer to the library documentation page.