I don't have the ability to do this myself, but it occured to me that there are numerous people here on ES that *do*. 
Given the...let's call it user-unfriendliness, to be kind, of most of the various brands of motor controllers' programming and setup software, how about creating an easy to use GUI-based setup program that can program "any" controller (that it has the data to do so)?
This is just some thoughts on how it could be setup, from a user-POV. How the internals work I have some ideas but not being a programmer I am sure there are better ways--the main point is to make it very easy to understand and use for the end-user, so whatever accomplishes that goal.
The UI part of the program would be something with well-translated terminology for various commonly-used languages (just pick the language to be used from a menu, like you would with many programs), and graphics that help less technical users find the right parameters for the things they are trying to change or setup. Tabs or pages of related settings clustered together would be helpful. If a parameter is part of more than one cluster of settings, it can be displayed in each one, and changed in any of them whcih would reflect in all of the instances automatically.
The backend part of the program would need to have data sets, probably something like a settings text file that can just be placed in the right folder before opening the program, so it scans that folder on every startup, so it can display the parameters for any particular controller brand and model and version the user can pick from a list, and then be able to write those parameters to the controller when done. (and/or read from the controller for those that support that).
Creating those data sets would probably require reverse engineering the data stream from programming each kind of controller out there, so that part might make this project impractical. But if there is a way to make "sniffing" this data cheap and easy for an end-user that doesn't know anything about anything like a program or app that can be run to insert itself into the serial data stream and save that stream to file, and then have the user input all of the settings they are changing, etc., it might make it more possible (if not any easier) to do.
I would guess that most brands of controller will use the same basic data format for all of their controllers, so once the format is figured out for one, it's likely that it can be applied to other models of theirs.
I doubt this would be an easy project to do, and I don't have much to contribute besides the idea, but it would be tremendously helpful to many many people if it could be done.
Given the...let's call it user-unfriendliness, to be kind, of most of the various brands of motor controllers' programming and setup software, how about creating an easy to use GUI-based setup program that can program "any" controller (that it has the data to do so)?
This is just some thoughts on how it could be setup, from a user-POV. How the internals work I have some ideas but not being a programmer I am sure there are better ways--the main point is to make it very easy to understand and use for the end-user, so whatever accomplishes that goal.
The UI part of the program would be something with well-translated terminology for various commonly-used languages (just pick the language to be used from a menu, like you would with many programs), and graphics that help less technical users find the right parameters for the things they are trying to change or setup. Tabs or pages of related settings clustered together would be helpful. If a parameter is part of more than one cluster of settings, it can be displayed in each one, and changed in any of them whcih would reflect in all of the instances automatically.
The backend part of the program would need to have data sets, probably something like a settings text file that can just be placed in the right folder before opening the program, so it scans that folder on every startup, so it can display the parameters for any particular controller brand and model and version the user can pick from a list, and then be able to write those parameters to the controller when done. (and/or read from the controller for those that support that).
Creating those data sets would probably require reverse engineering the data stream from programming each kind of controller out there, so that part might make this project impractical. But if there is a way to make "sniffing" this data cheap and easy for an end-user that doesn't know anything about anything
like a program or app that can be run to insert itself into the serial data stream and save that stream to file, and then have the user input all of the settings they are changing, etc., it might make it more possible (if not any easier) to do.I would guess that most brands of controller will use the same basic data format for all of their controllers, so once the format is figured out for one, it's likely that it can be applied to other models of theirs.
I doubt this would be an easy project to do, and I don't have much to contribute besides the idea, but it would be tremendously helpful to many many people if it could be done.
