Gocator Protocol

This section describes the TCP and UDP commands and data formats used by a client computer to communicate with Gocator sensors using the Gocator protocol. It also describes the connection types (Discovery, Control, Upgrade, Data, and Health), and data types. The protocol enables the client to:

• Discover Main and Buddy sensors on an IP network and re-configure their network addresses.
• Configure Main and Buddy sensors.
• Send commands to run sensors, provide software triggers, read/write files, etc.
• Receive data, health, and diagnostic messages.
• Upgrade firmware.

The Gocator 4.x/5.x firmware uses mm, mm2, mm3, and degrees as standard units. In all protocols, values are scaled by 1000, as values in the protocols are represented as integers. This results in effective units of mm/1000, mm2/1000, mm3/1000, and deg/1000 in the protocols.

To use the protocol, it must be enabled and configured in the active job.

Sensors send UDP broadcasts over the network over the Internal Discovery channel (port 2016) at regular intervals during operation to perform peer discovery.

The Gocator SDK provides open source C language libraries that implement the network commands and data formats defined in this section. For more information, see GoSDK.

For information on configuring the protocol using the web interface, see Ethernet Output.

For information on job file structures (for example, if you wish to create job files programmatically), see Job File Structure.