A few days ago my InMove (Alex), got stu[pid on me. He just stopped working pretty much and then would not complete initialization. Every time I started him up he would sound the alert that he was having issues with his serial ports. I have set his ports in the config file number 6 to be 3,4 and 5 with five being his neopixel port, and the other two his two Arduino Mega imbedded processors.
I am using the device manager in windows 10 to keep and eye on what is going on and adjust whch ports exist and their various parameters. When the usb cable is connected ports 6 and 7 appear and Alex tries to connect to ports 9 and 10 which do not appear in the device manager.
I make sure that all of the ports are set at 115200 for port speed. I have used the swing gui to check the Arduino ports and I can manually attach to ports 3,4,6, 7, 9 and 10. I choose ports 3 and 4 and they attach (left and right both turn the attach indicator green), but he does not work because the configuration files have not run. I do not know how to run them manually or individually and when I restart the computer and re-run the start inmove process I get another misconfiguration.
Does anyone have a clue as to what the heck is going on? I am fiddling around with this in lieu of just blanket upgrading MyRobotLab and re uploading the .ino from it to get thelatest version of that also. (basicly starting from ground zero).
I would prefer to understand what the problem is and fix it than just zero out everything and re-install/upgrade. I'm kind of picky that way. I may however be driven to the nuclear option out of frustration if I can not find the real problem.
Thanks for reading this and thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer.
MikeG
Hi MikeG, I have little
Hi MikeG,
I have little experience or knowledge regarding the ini config files ...
But, as kwatters mentioned in the shoutbox .. windows ports are typicallly COM6 COM7 COM9 and COM10 ...etc.
The operating system for one reason or another can mix up the ports.
With all the shuffling of ports ..
it can be a challenge on keeping track of whats going on. On Linux you can configure files so it doesn''t get shuffled up. I would suggest going back to the basics. Start MRL (not START_INMOOV.bat) .. create a single servo instance and a single arduino. Attach the arduino to the port you think might be correct, attach a servo to the arduino - and test a single servo.
In the simplest case, you should be able to verify what port windows has mapped to your actual arduinos, and that you can connect and drive a single servo with it. The MRLComm sketch that comes with the MRL your running should be loaded - the version of MRLComm & MRL were built together and should work together.
Also you can always send a noWorky - http://myrobotlab.org/content/helpful-myrobotlab-tips-and-tricks-0#noWorky Which sends a log file that might help.
arduinos + mrl
I do not want to critizice mrl but for me (or maybe rather my cheap china Arduinos) the connection took ages and many retries to get working.
There must be a timing problem with some boards and the arduinos do not restart as supposed?
It became so bad for me that I have created my own servo control .ino (it misses many features of the mrl-arduino but its sufficient for my current requirements).
I never experienced the connection problems with my own Arduino/Python setup.
Juerg