Overview
After starting the Industrial Communication Explorer, the main GUI window opens, as depicted in figure below:
The GUI window is divided into the following areas:
Tool Bar: Allows to run actions
Network Navigator: Provides a list of network interfaces, devices and snapshots
Editor Area: Provides the main functionality of the tool
Outline: Content dependent structural info for the Editor Area
Log View: Log of events within the Industrial Communication Explorer
The following sections describe the different areas in detail.
Tool Bar
The toolbar allows to run several actions like scanning for devices, read and write configuration, create snapshots aso:
Which actions are available is context dependent e.g. the “Read Configuration” item option is only available when a device is selected in the Network Navigator and the ConfigManager is active.
Network Navigator
The Network Navigator provides information about the available network interfaces on the PC which can be used to scan for devices. It also lists the found devices after scanning as well as available snapshots.
Only network interfaces with an active link and a valid IP configuration of the Device Manager are shown in the Network Navigator. To refresh the list of available network interfaces, right click on Network Interfaces and then select “Refresh interfaces”. This will update the list of interfaces and/or the IP address settings.
For each network interfaces, the number of found devices after scanning is listed in brackets after the network interface name.
While hovering the mouse cursor over a device in the Network Navigator, additional information such as the MAC address is shown in a tooltip as depicted in the figure below:
Editor Area
The Editor Area contains the GUI elements for the main features of the iRJ45 Device Manager.
The different features are arranged in tabs which are visible on top of the Editor Area. The user may rearrange the order of the tabs via Drag’n’Drop. To move a tab to a new position, select a tab with the left mouse button and drag it to the new position. The order of the tabs is persistent, so the new position of the tab is automatically saved and will also be restored after restartin the tool.
Depending on the selected tab in the Editor Area, different tools in the Tool Bar or different content in the Outline area is available.
Outline
The Outline provides a context dependent summary of the Editor Area.
For example, the Figure above shows the content of the Outline for a ConfigManager with an active configuration. In that case, it lists the different modules of the configuration with the available variables.
Log view
The log view shows events that occurred within the Industrial Communication Explorer such as established I/O connections, device scans aso.
The log view is divided in three columns:
Severity: The severity of the event. See Table 1 for possible severities
Date: The date and time when the event occurred
Message: The message describing the occurred event
The following table describes the possible values for the severity column of the view:
Severity | Icon | Decription |
Informational |
| Informational message such as started events etc. |
Warning |
| Warning message that an action did not produce the expected result e.g. no device found during a scan. |
Error |
| Error message that an action failed e.g. an I/O connection with the device timed out due to missing packets from the device. |