-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Thank you all for your help, I now have a functioning interface. As it turns out, trying to do things the "correct" way was wrong. The timing was so tight that doing anything (such as traversing the while-loop once) instead of a read immediately after transmission meant we missed the PLC's response. And, for whatever reason, I had to wrap the outgoing text in bytes() (this is still a mystery, but obviously it thinks strings going to the socket module are unicode.) The shorter, numeric, messages were able to complete sufficiently quickly that catching the response worked within a while loop but not the larger, 66-byte, message.
Again, thanks all for your assistance. Cheers, Todd - ---- The functional code --- def PLC_Functions(command, argument): """ Command is one of: GetTray, Status, SetText Argument is one of: tray number (as string), None, message (as string) The PC (arbitrarily) transmits / receives on socket 2260 (pcSocket) The PLC receives on socket 2002 and responds to whatever port it sees in the header The protocol used is UDP """ pcSocket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM, socket.IPPROTO_UDP) # bind it pcSocket.bind((config.get('megamat','pcip'),int(config.get('megamat','sourceport')))) # make them blocking (i/o is 'fire-and-forget' to a PLC that may or may not respond in a given time.) # non-blocking fails and raises windows exceptions for some reason (20-Oct-2010) pcSocket.settimeout(1.0) # 1ms? PLC will respond in ~0.10ms if command == 'CallTray': # frame 1 (see docs for frame sequence) print 'Received call tray command for tray %s' %(argument) getReadyMsg = '0145\r' totalsent = 0 while totalsent < len(getReadyMsg): sent = pcSocket.sendto(bytes(getReadyMsg[totalsent:]),MegaMatPLC) response, address = pcSocket.recvfrom(17) if sent == 0: raise RunTimeError('Transmission failure. Please confirm MegaMat settings in megapy.ini') totalsent = totalsent + sent # Frame 2 ''' response = '' while '\r' not in response: response, address = pcSocket.recvfrom(17) if response == '': raise RunTimeError('PLC did not respond') #this should be changed. The MIF software will wait until it receives a response or timeout, not ABEND ''' print response, address if response[0:4] == '0135': print 'Drive ready received.' # Frame 5 # Transmit tray request if int(argument) < 10: shelfPrefix = '0000' else: shelfPrefix = '000' shelf = shelfPrefix + argument unit = '001' stack = '01' """ There is a 10 digit number plus 40 blanks spaces after the shelf description built above. It is possible this is for storing shelf descriptions and barcodes on the PLC. We will follow the example of the MIF software and put a phony b/c and blank description. X is a field terminator and \r is the end of transmission (EoT.) """ fakeBarcode = '1234567890' fortySpacesField = ' ' + 'Todd Was Here' + ' ' + 'X\r' #fortySpacesField = ' '*40 + 'X\r' getShelfMsg = '0105' + shelf + unit + stack + fakeBarcode + fortySpacesField print 'Transmitting shelf request as follows: \n' + getShelfMsg sent = pcSocket.sendto(bytes(getShelfMsg),MegaMatPLC) response, address = pcSocket.recvfrom(132) print sent print response, address #Frame 6 ''' response = '' while '\r' not in response: response, address = pcSocket.recvfrom(16) if response == '': raise RunTimeError('PLC did not respond') #this should be changed. The MIF software will wait until it receives a response or timeout, not ABEND ''' print response, address pcSocket.close() -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkzBzN0ACgkQwnknPuQqPINgfQCeN4hm8jDCnwU2niC0dOHkJO8F +MAAn1/kECizBDEY4doQj1+3+Si9Zyjg =SvAW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list