Hello, I’m just starting to use Groov EPICs after using SNAP PAC controllers for years, and was excited to see how much easier it is to configure and communicate with a modbus device using Groov, rather than having to write a complicated subroutine to do this job in PAC display.
However, there doesn’t appear to be a clean way to use these tags within PAC Control. Am I missing something? Could I pass it from Groov to PAC Control using node-red?
Are you referring to the Modbus/TCP device tags inside of groov View?
Yes, configuring a modbus device and its tags, using Groov view. I was hoping this could be a means of reading/writing to this device in PAC Control, but perhaps it’s not that simple.
Hello, the tags that get imported to groov View do not move to Pac Control. You can read the Modbus tags using Node Red instead and then move the values to your Pac Control strategy using the node-red-contrib-pac nodes and import them to groov View directly from Pac Control.
Got it, thanks. I guess I was overly excited about the ease by which you can communicate with a modbus device using Groov View.
In my experience, writing a serial driver/subroutine in PAC Control is of course doable, but is tedious and takes some troubleshooting and debugging to get it working well.
@JCampbell would you advocate your approach of using Node-Red to read/write to the modbus device, and then move to PAC control, versus writing the driver natively in pac control? Say for example there are 5 writes and 10 reads.
Either option will work, directly from Pac Control or using Node Red in between. We have an example video for Modbus communication with Node Red Opto 22 - Playlist: Node-RED Workshops and for the Pac Control node Opto 22 - Playlist: Node-RED Workshops