This is a simple Windows application that reads an encoder count through US Digital QSB-D and shows it in GUI.
Go to our Releases page and download the zip file of the latest version named QSBLinearEncoderReader_w_x_y_z.zip where w_x_y_z is the version number (e.g. QSBLinearEncoderReader_2_0_0_0.zip).
Once you downloaded the zip file, right click it in the Explorer and select Properties. In the Properties dialog, open General tab and check if you can see "Unblock" checkbox in the bottom. If so, check the box and press Apply button. Now the checkbox should be gone. Once you confirm that the checkbox is not there, click OK button and extract this zip file as usual.
Once extracted, run setup.exe and follow the instructions to complete the installation.
If the installation is successful, the application launches automatically. Just close it at this moment.
Note: this application uses ClickOnce technology, so the application is installed per user and you do not need administrative permission.
Before launching this application, make sure that you connected QSB-D to an USB port of your computer. Then, check the port name of the QSB-D with US Digital Device Explorer. Typically, it is "COMx" where "x" is an integer number (e.g. COM4).
Select TMT International Observatory - QSB Linear Encoder Reader in the Windows menu.
Once the main application window is shown, click Connect to QSB Encoder Reader.
In the "Connect to QSB Encoder Reader" dialog, select an appropriate port name in COM Port:, set other configuration items accordingly and press the Connect button.
If it is connected to your QSB-D successfully, it starts to continuously read the current position from the encoder and display it in the main window as shown below:
Press Zero Encoder Count button to set the current position as zero.
You can stop statistics by pressing Stop button.
If you want to store the encoder readings in a CSV file, click Settings... first. A dialog shows up and you can configure the output directory, output file name, maximum records per one CSV file and recording interval (sampling rate for recording).
Click OK to close the dialog and click Start Recording to start the recording to CSV files. Once the number of records in one file reaches the configured limit, the following data is written to a new file. The file name is determined based on the configuration. If the file already exists, the recording stops. For a long running test, it is highly recommended to have date and time (%Y%m%d_%H%M%S) in the file name. If you are monitoring two or more encoders in one machine, it is also recommended to include the serial number of QSB-D (%N) in the file name. %Y, %m, %d, %H, %M, %S and %N are automatically substituted by appropriate values by this application.
The CSV file has three fields "Timestamp [s]", "Raw Count" and "Position [mm]".
The QSB-D samples the encoder value at 512 Hz and this application reads all the samples. The user can select recording interval as a multiple of 0.001953125 seconds (= 1/512). One record in the CSV file is typically 30 - 50 bytes. If the recording interval is 1 (= 0.01953125 seconds, 512 Hz), the CSV file grows at a rate of 15 - 25 kB/s or 0.9 - 1.5 MB/minute. If the recording interval is 512 (1 second, 1 Hz), the CSV file grows at a rate of 100 - 175 kB/hour or 2.5 - 4.1 MB/day.
Note that the timestamp is based on the 32-bit timestamp register in the QSB-D, which is incremented at 512 Hz. The timestamp register is reset when the power to QSB-D is turned off. If you keep running QSB-D more than 94.5 days, the timestamp register may be reset to 0. The timestamp register is most probably based on a free running counter in the QSB-D and it is not synchronized to UTC. When you want to correlate the recorded data in the CSV files with something else, please keep in mind that it can be slightly less or more than 512 Hz.
Flush interval option allows you to control how often the data is actually written to the CSV file. This parameter is important if you want to open the file while recording.
Since version 1.4.1.0, the application automatically checks if a new version is available every time it launches. If "Update Available" dialog is shown as below, it means that a new version is available. Just click OK to install the latest version.
After the latest version is successfully installed and launched, you may encounter a blue dialog titled "Windows protected your PC". Click "More info" link in the dialog and run "Run anyway" button.
Note: if you are using version 1.4.0.0 or older, the automatic version check feature is not available. If you want to upgrade to a newer version, you first need to uninstall the old version and install a new one.
Note: if you want to downgrade to an old version, the recommended approach is to uninstall the existing version and install the old version.
If you want to uninstall this application, open Control Panel and select Uninstall a program. Then, a list of installed applications is shown. Find "QSB Linear Encoder Reader", right-click it, select "Uninstall/Change" and follow dialog instructions to complete the uninstallation.
TMT International Observatory holds the copyright of software, images and documents in this repository except the files below:
- the following documents distributed by US Digital:
- all image files under icons/icnoir.
- They were obtained from https://github.com/iconoir-icons/iconoir.
- They are distributed under MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.
File any bugs, enhancement proposals, feature requests on Issues.
The information for software developers who want to modify the code and release new versions can be found in DEVELOPER.md.