I’ve written a small program called EkBoxTester that you can download to aid in testing your Digital Setting Circles interface board after you’ve constructed it. EkBoxTester requires Microsoft .Net 4.0 to be installed on your computer. EkBoxTester consists of a single executable file (EkBoxTester.exe) that can be run from wherever you want. There is no installer–just download and run it.

The source code for EkBoxTester can be downloaded from here. It was written using Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express Edition–a free but reasonably complete development environment for writing .Net applications in C#. You can use the source code as an example of how to communicate with an EkBox via the serial port.

When you launch EkBoxTester, the following window appears:

EkBoxTester Initial View

It’s pretty simple to use. Select the COM port to which your interface is connected, specify the encoder resolutions, and then click the “Start Test” button. When you click the “Start Test” button, EkBoxTester will attempt to open the COM port and send the command to the interface to set the encoder resolutions. If this doesn’t succeed, you’ll see an error message that will describe the specific problem encountered. Otherwise, if everything succeeds, the EkBoxTester window should now look like this:

EkBoxTester after "Start Test" is clicked

At this point, the numbers in red should change as you turn the encoders. If you don’t have any encoders connected, you’ll still see the red numbers but they will not change (obviously), but this is an indicator that things on the board appear to be working correctly. You can click the “Get Errors” button to see how many encoder errors have occurred (generally, none) and the “Get Resolutions” button to query the interface for the current encoder resolutions (which should be the same as what you specified in the inputs toward the top of the window).

Once you’re finished, click the “Stop Test” button, or just exit the program by clicking the red X in the top right corner.