UART Interface

This chapter documents the Nano Safety Controller Pro's UART serial interface — the message structure and the joystick and keypad message formats — and notes that a configuration can use serial or CAN messaging, but not both.

The Nano Safety Controller Pro provides a UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) interface for sending and receiving messages.

Note:

Although an NSC Pro supports both CAN and UART messaging, you cannot implement both in a configuration. When you build a configuration in FORT Manager, you can enable either CAN mode or serial mode (UART) for data transmission (or neither if you aren’t planning to provide a data connection).

Serial Message Structure

The following table shows the structure of serial messages.

Table 1. Table 54 Serial Message Structure
Offset	Field	Length (Byte)	Description
0	Header	2	0x1001
2	Type	1	JOYSTICK = 0x50
KEYPAD = 0x51
3	Length	1	Data Length
4	Data	x	Per message type
message_length-2	Checksum	2

Joystick Message

The following table shows details about the Joystick message.

Table 2. Table 55 Joystick Message
Field	Length	Description
Left X	16 bit	12bit signed ADC value Bit 13 `dataOK` Max = 0x17FF, Center = 0x1000, Min = 0x1800
Left Y	16 bit	See above
Left Z	16 bit	See above
Right X	16 bit	See above
Right Y	16 bit	See above
Right Z	16 bit	See above

Keypad Message

The following table provides details about the Keypad message.

Table 3. Table 56 Keypad Message
Field	Length	Description - Bitmap
Keypad Left	8 bit	[6-7]Down [4-5]Right [2-3]Up [0-1]Left
Keypad Center	8 bit	[6-7] [4-5]Menu [2-3]Power [0-1]Pause
Keypad Right	8 bit	[6-7]”1” [4-5]”2” [2-3]”3” [0-1]”4”

The button values for the keypad message are:

[0]Notset
[1]Set
[2]Error
[3]Unavailable