Python GRPC client bindings

The poulpe_ethercat_controller crate provides a GRPC server and client interface that can be accessed by multiple clients at the same time, either in Rust or Python. The GRPC server is implemented in Rust and the client bindings are generated for both Rust and Python. The python bindings are implemented in python_client crate.

Installation

To use this client run the following command:

maturin develop --release

You will hav to use a virtual environment to install the client with the maturin command. So make sure to activate the virtual environment before running the command. We suggest using conda to create the virtual environment, but you can use venv or virtualenv as well.

conda create -n poulpe_ethercat python=3.10
conda activate poulpe_ethercat

Once you have the virtual environment activated you can run the following command:

pip install maturin
maturin develop --release

This will install the python client in the current environment. And then you can open the notebooks in the notebooks folder and scripts in the scripts folder to see how to use the client.

The client is a wrapper around the GRPC client generated from the poulpe_ethercat_grpc/src/client.rs folder.

Run the GRPC server

Make sure to run the GRPC server before running the client. This can be done using the following command:

cargo run --release ../config/file/here.yaml

Simple example

from python_client import PyPoulpeRemoteClient
import time

slave_id = 0
no_axis = 3

print('Connecting on slave: {}'.format(slave_id))
# Create an instance of the client
client = PyPoulpeRemoteClient("http://127.0.0.1:50098", [slave_id], 0.001)

time.sleep(1.0)

print("Connected slaves to master: {}".format(client.get_connected_devices()))

print("Slave {} compliancy is: {}".format(slave_id, client.get_torque_state(slave_id)))
print("Slave {} current position: {}".format(slave_id, client.get_position_actual_value(slave_id)))

which might output something like:

Connecting on slave: 0
Connected slaves to master: ([0], ['NeckOrbita3d'])
Slave 0 compliancy is: True
Slave 0 current position: [-0.0011222249595448375, 3.743586057680659e-05, 6.8065196501265746e-06]