Terminal
The terminal is a widget that is used for two different purposes:
- To report all that is happening when you perform a test inside the Wizard.
- To run Python commands, especially to communicate and control the drive using the ingeniamotion library.
The next sections explain these two use cases in detail.
Showing Wizard's test results
The terminal is a widget that reports all that is happening when you perform a test inside the Wizard. Every time that you click a button with "TEST" on it, it will open the Terminal widget at the bottom of your screen (see green rectangle below) and it will report a description of exactly all the instructions that the test is running. This is good for 2 main reasons:
- To have full visibility of the instructions that the test is running
- To understand more easily what the source of the problem could be when the particular test fails
Running Python commands with the terminal
Ingeniamotion is an open-source Python library used to facilitate the commissioning of the Novanta Servo drives. The use of the library is not required for the commissioning. However, if you would like to use it, you can find the detailed documentation here: Welcome to ingeniamotion’s documentation! — ingeniamotion 0.7.0 documentation (ingeniamc.com). Below, you can find a general explanation and examples.
The terminal can also be used as a Python command prompt to run commands or short scripts. To open the terminal click on the following button in the toolbar:
Then the terminal opens and a Python console starts:
Example
Once a drive is connected, the mc (MotionController ) object can be used to interact with the motor. For instance, you can use the motion namespace to enable and move the motor:
When opening the functions' parenthesis a short documentation is shown.
Note that the arguments and outputs of the function are shown along with a short description. For complete documentation of all functions and to get to know ingeniamotion, please refer to the library's documentation page.