Basics Motorcortex Desk

Motorcortex Desk is a visualization tool based on the Parameter Tree. The Parameter Tree is the epicenter of controlling your application. Everything that is happening inside the application is shown and can be controlled in this Parameter Tree. In the following steps you will learn the basics how control your application using Motorcortex Desk.

Login to Motorcortex Desk

1. Login to your motorcortex.io account. If you don’t have a account yet make sure to to register for an account.

   

2. Enter Motorcortex Desk by clicking Desk in the left menu. This will open the Motorcortex Desk login page.

   

3. Fill in the server address in the Connection panel, per default this is 192.168.2.100.

   

4. Close the lock🔒 button to select a secure connection.

5. Click the Connect button, per default a login an password is not needed. The state chip next to the panel title changes to Connected.

   Note

   If you have troubles with login make sure to check out your connection try Connection Troubleshooting

Use Motorcortex Desk

Motorcortex Desk visualizes all parameters of your application and works like a directory system. For the following example we have connected a switch and a light to our IO device to check and manipulate the parameters of this device.

6. In the Parameters panel you can browse to the Ethercat folder. This folder contains all the parameters of the EtherCAT configuration. With these parameters you can control the configured EtherCAT devices.

7. In the Ethercat folder you will find parameters and the Domain folders that were configured in Motorcortex Ecat.

8. In the Domain folder(s) you will find the Device folders that were configured in Motorcortex Ecat.

9. In the Device folder(s) wil contain the parameters to control your device.

   

10. Double click a parameter to plot it. The signal appears in the plot and is listed in the Active panel on the right, where you can change its colour, its Y axis or hide it again. Double click it once more to remove it. In this example both the Input and Output signals of the EtherCAT device are plotted.

    

11. By pushing the button you see the input signal is changing from 0 to 1.

12. Writable parameters have an input field next to their value, both in the tree and in the Active panel. This can be used to manipulate the digital output value. By filling in a value of 1 and hitting enter the output value is set to high and the light wil be turned on.

13. Congratulations you have now managed to control your own Motorcortex application using Motorcortex Desk.