On 08/30/2012 07:23 AM, Marc Welz wrote:
katcmd looks like a nice way to avoid having to use something like
pexpect on the ROACH PPC telnet port. That's good for people who really
want to avoid Python.
I've decided to have our firmware compatible with core.katcp_wrapper.
Using pyro has other advantages for we are in the process of overhauling
our DSN radio astronomy monitor and control software. I'm still
learning pyro. Does SKA/KAT have any advice for me on that?
Best regards
Tom
To minimize network traffic, the file with the commands could be on the
local host rather than on a remote machine; then the only thing that goes
over the network is the file name. I also have a small program that allows
you to run individual katcp commands but is far more user-friendly than
trying to type those commands directly to the server over a telnet
connection.
That's a front end to katcpComm, I guess. I'm not sure how I could grow
from that into a complex interactive graphical program, except very
painfully using the Motif library or something like that. There is a good
reason for languages like Python and Matlab.
If your gateware control functions are not particularly complicated
you could use kcpcmd to do the work - so from a program shell out (eg
system("kcpcmd ..."), or from a script invoke it like any other
utility.
Shell example (-p allows more interesting constructs)
#!/bin/sh
if kcpcmd -i -s $ROACHNAME wordread sys_scratchpad 0 | grep -q deadbeef ; then
echo "scratchpad already set to to deadbeef"
exit 0
else
kcpcmd -i -s $ROACHNAME wordwrite sys_scratchpad 0 0xc0cac01a
fi
kcpcmd can be found at github.com/ska-sa/katcp_devel/ - git clone the
tree, do a make and if things work out then you should have an
executable in cmd/kcpcmd [1]
I'll cross-compile it for the roach 2, so that one can run code
locally there too.
Another option, if you wish to talk to a roach without using any
existing tool or library, is to use a trick I saw in troll ftpd long
ago: In C use the normal logic to connect a network socket/fd, and
then use fdopen on it, that allows you to do things such as
fprintf(fp, "?wordread sys_scratchpad 0\n"); It isn't ideal, but will
allow you to talk to a roach without using a library (other than
libc).
regards
marc
[1] You probably don't want to run a "make install" in the full
katcp_devel tree, unless you want to set a correlator control server,
but a "make -C cmd install" is ok.
--
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