ASDA tools

Simple Python3 parser for .par files produced by ASDASoft by Delta Electronics. Main purpose of this tool is to help with comparing servo driver configuration backups using 'normal' tools such as vimdiff.

It can also be used as an diff-tool for git, so you will get human-readable git diffs while commiting raw binary .par files to your repository.

Warning

This was tested only on a few files produced by ASDASoft version 5.4.1.0 with ASDA-A2 servo driver. Implementation may be incomplete for other series.

On the other hand, this script tries to work on the safe side - if it produces json output without giving any error, then you can be sure, that it can completely recreate original .par file from this json.

This script was created by examination of few .par files. The script is most probably not complete. If you find that it fails on any .par file produced by ASDASoft, feel free to create new issue and please include that .par file. (You will probably need to zip it before Github will accept it.)

Using as git diff-tool

All the parsing is located in a single script asda_tools/asdapar2json.py and it has no special dependency. So you can copy it to your repository. (Let's assume, it will be in the same place as in this repository, inside asda_tools directory.)

Then you need to asociate .par files with new difftool by creating a .gitattributes with content:

*.par diff=asdapar2json

And lastly, you need to enable this script in every clone of your repository.

That is security measure -- script will be run automatically by git in the background. It might be better idea to have script somewhere outside of the repository and update it manually. Otherwise mallicious version can be run by git when you switch to branch from untrusted source!

But it should be safe in case of your private repository.

In that case, just add:

[diff "asdapar2json"]
	textconv = `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`/asda_tools/asdapar2json.py

to the file .git/config.

If you are brave enough to run my version, you can test it on this repository :)

Just clone it, edit the .git/config and run:

git log -p test/test_files/test_01_pr.par