Host Engineering, Inc.
Ethernet SDK

This SDK provides the necessary files to develop applications which interface with 
AutomationDirect's Ethernet modules. The products currently supported are the EBCs, ECOMs 
and EDRVs. As additional products are developed this SDK will be enhanced to support them.

This SDK is provided free of charge. As such, you're pretty much on your own. We are not 
providing telephone support at this time. If we end up having to do so, we will not continue 
providing the SDK at no cost. If you have tech questions which you are unable to resolve, 
we will try to answer email. Our email address for this is SDKSupport@Hosteng.com. As we get 
questions we will compile a FAQ which we will put on our web site and include with future 
versions of the SDK.

The samples provided cover most (but not all) of the things you will be doing. If there are 
specific uses that we have not covered, email us and we will try to put together some sample 
code.

The SDK consists of 4 basic goodies.
1) Some ethernet utils (including the built samples) found in UTILS\
2) The libs and header found in LIB\ and INCLUDE\
3) The interface doc found in the root
4) The samples found in DEMOCODE\. The samples included are EQ which demos the basic 
query and interrogate of all ether products, ETHERIO which demos logical address 
resolution and a non-blocking CCM transaction to an Hx-ECOM, and ETHERIO which demos 
logical address resolution and an IO read operation on an EBC. 

A couple of things to remember:
* These are the same tools that we use when we develop products which talk to ethernet modules. 

* Pretty much all you do is write your code, include the header, and link with the appropriate 
library. This stuff has been tested with VC++. Borland and Symantec may or may not work without 
tweeks. The vendors change so much so fast we gave up on being universally friendly.

* If what you're doing doesn't seem to be working, always try to talk to the device with EQ or 
NetEdit. If they don't talk you have other problems.

* Logical names are case sensitive and so is the unused portion of the name buffer (should be 0).

* H2-ECOMs don't work with DL230s or in the first slot of the base.

* Transport failures are usually caused by uninstalled protocols.

* If EBC access isn't as fast as you'd like, try HEIReadIOEx and/or HEIWriteIOEx. They are MUCH 
faster if you are accessing multiple devices.

Robert Oglesby
President, Host Engineering
10-March-2003