The New AX Driver wizard generates a skeleton directory structure including the Java source that is necessary to start developing a Niagara AX driver.


New Driver Wizard Step 1 Illustration

Note: The first step of the wizard prompts you to choose a driver framework. Here is an explanation about these two options.


Developer Driver

The resulting source code and driver jar will feature support for pinging devices, reading data points, writing data points, discovering devices (Device Manager), and discovering data points (Point Manager). The developer should simply need to fill in the details about his or her protocol within a series of request, response, and identification classes.

Reasonable default implementations of the device ping, device discovery (Device Manager), data point poll, data point write, and data point discovery (Point Manager) are provided automatically by the Developer Driver Framework. The majority of Java classes and methods are capable of being overridden, however, so the developer will be free to override or extend any default behavior that the Developer Driver Framework provides.


Basic Driver

The Basic Driver Framework is a predecessor to the Developer Driver Framework. It is not a comprehensive framework and does not model nearly as many aspects of a field-bus driver as the Developer Driver Framework. Expert knowledge of the Niagara AX core framework will likely be required, especially If the driver does not follow a very simple serial protocol.

Choosing this option will generate the directory structure and source code necessary to begin developing a driver on top of the Basic Driver Framework (basicDriver). Unlike devDriver, basicDriver does not provide default implementations for all common aspects of field-bus drivers. Therefore, the developer will have to model and implement most aspects of the field-bus driver, including the user-interface for the device and point manager his or herself by extending Java classes from the core Niagara AX framework and from the basicDriver module.