If you are a big fan of Yoctopuce products, and we know that some of you are, you probably installed Yoctopuce network hubs all over the place, and now you have a problem: you don't quite remember which one is where. This week, we have a small present for you.
As you can imagine, we have exactly the same problem. At any time, Yoctopuce's lab if stuffed with various experiments connected to the network thanks to many YoctoHubs. And no matter how many labels we put on them, at some point, it's starting to be somewhat tough to manage. Therefore, we created Yocto-Discovery, a small application to list all the Yoctopuce modules present on a local network.
Yocto-Discovery
Yocto-Discovery is a simple and neat application, written in C#, which scans the local network as well as the local USB ports to look for Yoctopuce modules and then displays everything it found as a connection tree. For each module found, it can display its main characteristics: model, serial number, logical name, beacon, and so on... as well as the state of its on-board functions.
The Yocto-Discovery interface
Yocto-Discovery is a limited application by design. Its aim is to give an overview of the Yoctopuce modules present on the local network, not to concurrence the VirtualHub. Therefore, Yocto-Beacon management is the only possible interaction with the detected modules, everything else is "read only".
If you truly have a lot of modules, you'll be certainly happy to use the search function which enables you to quickly find modules depending on any of their properties: logical name, model, address, and so on...
Installation
Yocto-Discovery is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. You can download the installation files from the Yoctopuce's tools page. Under Windows, you need only Framework .Net 3.5, which means that you can also install this application on Windows XP.
On Linux and MacOS, you need to install Mono that you can download for free from the Mono-Project site. Once again, we are amazed by Mono people's work. It enables you to create multi-platform graphical interfaces without too much effort.
Limitations
As nothing is really magical here on earth, Yocto-Discovery has some limitations:
- As said before, by design, managing the Yocto-Beacon is the only possible interaction with the detected modules.
- As with all the Yoctopuce applications, Yocto-Discovery cannot access local USB ports if they are locked by another application using the Yoctopuce API.
- Yocto-Discovery cannot detect VirtualHubs running elsewhere than on the local machine.
- Yocto-Discovery detects only the hubs present on the local network, hubs connected to other subnetworks stay invisible.
- Read-protected hubs won't be shown.
Conclusion
We hope that this small tool will be as useful to you as it is to us. As usual, it is free and you can find its complete source code on GitHub. Naturally, all comments and other suggestions are welcome.