Testing With RS485 to USB
1 Preinstalled Cables
2 Prerequisites
Windows XP or later.
FTDI VCP driver installed. This is the driver for the USB<>485 converter and it can be downloaded here.
Supermodified Commander installed. This is the stand alone application that communicates to the controllers. It can be downloaded here.
3.2 Connections for USB - UART
Important Note: Because UART signals are referenced to ground it is necessary that there is a common ground between the RS485<>USB and the 01TM Supermodified controller. This can also be done by connecting the power ground to the USB<>RS485 converter.
4 Testing with Supermodified Commander
After installing the drivers and making the necessary connections and before launching the 01TM Supermodified commander, it is recommended to check at which COM port the USB<>485 converter resides. This can be seen at Control Panel -> Device Manager in any version of windows.

In this example the serial port is COM1.
Now it is time to launch the 01TM Supermodified Commander. Upon launch this is what you should see:

The first thing to do is select the COM port that the USB<>485 converter is connected to. Just select the appropriate COM port from the combo box:

Next hit the connect button. This is what you should see:

After successful connection to the COM port scan the bus for 01TM Supermodified controllers. Just hit the SCAN BUS FOR MOTORS button. The progress bar for bus querying appears.

After the bus scan is complete the Motor Id selection combo box must contain the only node found on the bus, ie ID #4, which is the default setting for any new 01TM Supermodified controller.

Now it is time to try out some of the available commands. Before that, go ahead and check that the controller is currently not applying any force on the motor. Try to move the shaft of the motor and notice that it rotates freely. Now press the START button and notice at the bottom of the screen:

This is the console window and it has many useful information about communication warnings or errors etc. Now check the motor shaft again. You will notice that the controller is holding the shaft in position.
Go ahead and test another command. For example an absolute position move. Just hit the MOVE TO ABSOLUTE POSITION text. An input window appears:

The base unit for the 01TM Supermodified controller is the encoder tick. The MagEnc utilizes an absolute encoder that has 32768 ticks per revolution. So in order to instruct the controller to do a full turn you can enter 32768 and hit enter. The motor performs a full turn.
All commands utilize the encoder tick as a base unit. Thus velocities are in ticks/sec and accelerations in ticks/sec2. You can now try any other command.
5 Errors and warnings


If you try to execute any command after that it will fail with the same error code. This is because the Supermodified controller needs to be explicitly instructed to erase the error. There are many good reasons for this and some of them are related to safety.
So if you want to continue using the controller you must issue a RESET ERRORS command.
There are many more things you can do with the Supermodified commander, the most important being calibrating PID and adjusting configuration settings etc. These are covered in the Supermodified Configuration Guide.
This page can be downloaded in a handy pdf file here.