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Prepare your Tapioca/TapNPass

This page briefly explains how to prepare your hardware and your symbol table before working with the 'Tap Manager' mobile application and Tapioca (or TapNPass):

Connect your hardware

For a serial equipement, Tap Manager must be used with Modbus (either RTU or TCP). Please look at the datasheet how to connect TapNPass/Tapioca to your Modbus equipment.

All datasheets for Tapioca and TapNPass are available on the Datasheets page.

The 'Default' application for NFC

The IoTize products store into the NFC front end a link to the mobile application to be launched when 'NFC tapping' (AAR for Android and URI for iOS). Both TapNPass and Tapioca usually come with a link to the 'Toolbox' application (search on the stores 'IoTize Toolbox') which offers various utilities for Modbus that you could try before working with Tap Manager.

If you start with Toolbox, you will check your Modbus parameters (and the serial configuration in the case of Modbus-RTU) by running some simple reads from the dedicated 'Modbus' form. The link below will present a brief documentation of the Toolbox App: https://docs.iotize.com/ApplicationNotes/AppGenModbus/#13-testing-with-toolbox

From now on, we will consider only Tap Manager as mobile application.

The Symbol table

In the same way as for a module, you advise you to prepare a symbol file (for example CSV for modbus ) which corresponds to the registers which you wish to monitor.

Unlike a TapNLink module, a Tapioca (or TapNPass) gateway is NOT delivered with a reference hardware and will work only if you connect it to your own Modbus equipement. Therefore, you will have to create by yourself the symbol table.

The following CSV file shows the syntax to use to describe a list of Modbus registers: 

 Name,Address,Group,Type,Quantity,ByteOrder,Slave,DataModel
 Temperature,1,Sensors,u16,1,B1\_B0,1,INPUTREG
 Humidity,2,Sensors,u16,1,B1\_B0,1,INPUTREG
 Device address,257, Configuration,u16,1,B1\_B0,1,HOLDINGREG
 Baud rate,258,Configuration,u16,1,B1\_B0,1,HOLDINGREG
 Temperature correction,259,Configuration,u16,1,B1\_B0,1,HOLDINGREG
 Humidity correction,260,Configuration, u16,1,B1\_B0,1,HOLDINGREG
More information about this syntax are available HERE

Note that if you have several slaves on your bus, you can import several files. However, you will only be asked for one during the course of the tutorial and you will have to import later the registers of the other slaves.

Once your file is ready on your computer, you need to copy it onto your mobile. Below several ways for this transfer:

  • if you use a 'drive application' on both your computer and your mobile (iCloud drive, One Drive,...) use it as a common location.

  • a second solution consists in copying your file onto a web site and then download it from this site.

  • Finally, you can attach the file to an email that you'll open from your mobile, then download/save it onto your mobile.

We now go back to the Tap Manager 'Getting Started'.

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