Helicon Soft Forum

Good afternoon (o;

As I want to use Helicon Remote not only with focus bracketing but with a linear rail system I got the idea for doing an open source project on Github:

• Based on cheap RP2040 Raspberry Pico board which has USB device/host integrated
  Trinamic TMC2209 driver chip

So I think the best solution is to emulate the Trinamic PANdrive system which uses TMCL commands.

I hooked up a serial terminal to see what Helicon Remote sends, but those weren't the commands I would expect as those are not documented.

So what is Helicon Remote actually sending and expecting to recognize it as a genuine Trinamic PANdrive?


thanks in advance
richard

Hello Richard,

We don't use any undocumented commands, we only have the publicly available documentation as reference.

What you've seen in the terminal could be the commands to detect Wemacro or Stackshot3X. Your firmware will need to gracefully discard these unrecognized sequences.

Hello Catherine

So which commands are sent out to detect the PANdrive?
Or is it just assumed to be a PANdrive based on VID/PID match?


thanks in advance
richard

When I look at Farnell it says that this PANdrive is no longer manufactured....

So Helicon Remote supports something obsolete....though still:
What makes Helicon Remote think that a PANdrive is connected????

The TMCM-1141 controller is not deprecated, as far as I know. Which device are you trying to emulate? Are you presenting your device as a virtual COM port or as FTDI interface? In all cases dynamic detection is used via communicating with the device, as VID+PID-based detection is not possible.