Docklight News

Introducing Docklight Pro Monitor and Docklight Tap 485 Using Docklight helps eliminate a lot of time-consuming manual labor when testing or validating serial protocol applications. Now you can work with the same outstanding ease in more challenging areas, where our classic Docklight software was not designed to operate. We are pleased to introduce: Docklight Pro Monitor and Docklight Tap 485 , a dedicated software & hardware solution for: High-speed serial monitoring up to 921 kbps Time-critical applications RS232 applications where hardware handshaking , resp. RTS / CTS / DTR / DSR / DCD / RI signal states are involved RS485 2-wire and RS422 4-wire differential signal applications  Docklight Pro Monitor is a free addition to all Docklight Scripting license holders. Evaluation is free and without time limit, as always. Try it now: Download Docklight Pro Monitor Docklight Pro Monitor works with our Docklight Tap Pro and Docklight Tap 485 USB data ...

The free updates to Docklight and Docklight Scripting are out now. You can download the updated software from here: Docklight runs smoothly on the fresh Windows 10 Download Docklight V2.1 and Docklight Scripting V2.1 It has taken us quite a while to come up with the final features, and here's why: We actually spend a lot of time working with Docklight, not on  Docklight. Docklight & Kickdrive powered Touch Panel UI New functions that go into Docklight are either things our users needed to solve a specific problem. Or we needed it ourselves, to build some interesting applications for equipment control & configuration. The pretty touch panel to the left was made using a  Docklight DLL  inside a  Kickdrive Runtime Application . It talks to a Technosoft controller using a custom serial protocol including a checksum. So in Docklight and Docklight Scripting V2.1 you can benefit from a very accessible checksum/CRC calculator...

In short Docklight and Docklight Scripting just became faster and better looking. Grab a preview of the upcoming update: Docklight Scripting V2.0.x Customer Support Version Docklight V2.0.x Customer Support Version The Full Story The Docklight software tools certainly have a history, with the first Docklight released in 2002. This does not stop them from working flawlessly on any recent 32 or 64 bit Windows system with a huge range of serial communications hardware and software, but there was always one well documented limitation: Docklight is only as fast as its communication output formatting .  Specifically the Rich Text Format (RTF) display can be a true bottleneck in any communication logging that produces a lot of color changes, e.g. due to different data directions, timestamps or control character comments. We now carefully reworked the related code and found a much improved solution which increases RTF formatting speed by factor 3-5. The updated Dockli...

UPDATED 2016-06: See our latest extensions and USB HID related fixes for Windows 10 . Did you design a custom USB HID device and wonder why you cannot test its application protocol with the same ease as serial COM (RS232, ..) or network TCP connections?  Well we did, too, along with quite a few of our users. So it was high time to get this feature off the wishlist and into the software. See the Docklight FAQ - USB HID , or download the new software directly from here:  https://docklight.de/download/Docklight_Scripting.zip While we are still on our way to a concise and fully documented implementation, we found the current V2.0.200 version already very useful for our own projects with fullmo.de - a Microchip PIC based communication gateway running a custom ASCII protocol via USB HID. How to use Docklight Scripting V2.0.200 can connect to your custom HID device via the VID (vendor ID) and PID (product ID) code, if you use the following commun...

Dear Docklight Users, During the past couple of months we have been building and fine-tuning a new software package to assist you with the following scenario: You have a serial communications application, like an embedded device talking to a PC. You have already manually tested its functionality and created a Docklight project for it, maybe even a Docklight script for some basic automation. But what you actually need is to have your own application talk to the device. This could be a simple Microsoft Excel worksheet, but also any C++/C/C#/Java Windows application. Here is where our new “Docklight DLL” package fits right in. It provides a set of commands allowing you to load existing Docklight projects and use the same communications processing and Send/Receive Sequence functionality that is available in the Docklight Scripting desktop application. More information and download links are available on our Docklight web site: http://docklight.de/information/#docklight...

Dear Docklight Users, We are glad to inform you that our Docklight software packages have been updated: - Docklight V2.0 (improved Receive Sequence matching, plus many small fixes and improvements) - Docklight Scripting V2.0 (new script methods for float conversion, time stamps, handshaking, and other fixes) Docklight V2.0 and Docklight Scripting V2.0 are available at our download section: http://www.docklight.de/download_en.htm You can find a complete list of changes below. As in the past, the new versions are available as free updates for users of previous releases. What’s new in this version? This update was mostly about under-the-hood work, ironing out some glitches or limitations that were reported by our users. Most notably, the Receive Sequence detection algorithm has been improved. It will now also trigger on character patterns that were overlooked in V1.9 or earlier, due to what was described as “cursor based matching” in earlier Docklight manuals. Another crit...

Dear Docklight Users, We are glad to announce - our new Docklight Tap accessory, a compact RS232 monitoring solution for USB http://docklight.de/info_en.htm#dl_info_tap and two new Docklight software releases: - Docklight V1.9 (milliseconds time stamps, new expert settings for timing-critical applications) - Docklight Scripting V1.9 (detection of handshake signal changes, script break & continue,  include files, support for external program editors with syntax highlighting) Docklight Tap is a RS232 data tap for the USB port that has been designed for timing-critical monitoring applications, where standard Serial-to-USB converters usually reveal poor time tagging accuracy and high latency times. Both Docklight V1.9 and Docklight Scripting V1.9 support the Docklight Tap, offering fast and direct access to the two Docklight Tap data directions. See our new Docklight Tap Application note for full details: http://www.docklight.de/pdf/Docklight_Application_Note...