Faro Arm

SGI - Serial Ports

It might be true that you'd like to use the faro arm from your very own code. Thinking this would be true, I made a handy set of routines to do just that. The faro connects to a serial port. The device has a fairly simple RS232 ascii text interface. The routines here send the basic commands and parse the text response. The Faro Arm manual (A blue binder on the documention shelf in the lab) has the details of the interface. There is quite a bit the arm can do that these routines dont address, but for the simplest case they'll save you figuring out the exact syntax of that darn scanf() to parse the data right.

I dont see any reason the faro code shouldnt work on the Mac as well, since I have the same serial API there, but I havent tested it.

Faro_Open()

Faro_Close()

Faro_ReadPoint() - read x,y,z of current arm location as well as rotation and buttons

Faro_ReadClickButton() - wait for a button press and report the location

Faro_PrintPoint() - dump the FaroPoint data structure to screen

Source and sample code for SGI - /u/jedavis/src/lib/faro_arm
You also need the serial port code - /u/jedavis/src/lib/serialport

James Davis - jedavis@cs.stanford.edu