This screen is mainly useful for you to provide information back to us that will help us determine the cause of any problems you are having. Below is a description of all the items on this screen which may help give you an opportunity to self-diagnose any issues you may encounter.
Hand Controller Section:
When the Hand Controller is working properly the status will display "OK".
Number of Corrupted Packets: This value shown in yellow in the Hand Controller section indicates the number of corrupted packets received from the Motor Controller. Each transmission packet begins with a known byte sequence which includes the Address set by the dip switches and concludes with two checksum bytes. Any packet that does not pass the checksum validation is considered a corrupted packet and is ignored. Incoming packets can become corrupted by receiving noise from another RF source such as a cordless phone. It is normal to see this value increasing due to rejected packets but if it is increasing very rapidly for extended periods of time then you may be operating in a very noisy RF environment and the performance of the RF interface may become affected.
Number of Comm. Timeouts: This value shown in yellow in the Hand Controller section indicates the number of times that a transmission was aborted due to exceeding the packet retry limit described below. Communication timeouts are considered more serious than corrupted packets. If you are getting corrupted packets but no communication timeouts then you can be assured that everything is working just fine. Each transmission sent to the Motor Controller is verified by a return transmission from the Motor Controller. If no response is received then the Hand Controller will resend the transmission. The number of times it will retry the transmission is defined by the Retry Setting described below. When a communication timeout occurs the Hand Controller aborts the transmission and goes into a mode to re-establish communications with the Motor Controller. The Motor Controller status will display as "FAILED" until communication is re-established. You may want to increase the Retry Setting if you continue to get communication timeouts.
Retry Setting: This setting determines the number of transmissions that will be attempted before the current command from the hand controller to the motor controller is aborted. Each time a command is aborted it will raise the value of Comm. Timeouts described in the above paragraph. The hand controller will attempt to re-transmit commands every 200 ms so the default retry setting of 50 is very conservative and requires that 10 seconds pass before a command is aborted. This setting is configurable because the RF environment may vary from user to user. If you get a lot of corrupted packets you may need to increase this value. It is very likely that you could lower this value and still have proper communications with no timeouts. But the only thing you really gain by lowering this value is that a failure or loss of power in the motor controller can be detected faster. With the default value of 50, if you turned off power to the motor controller it will take 10 seconds before the "FAILED" status will appear. If you reduced this value to 5 the failure would be detected in 1 second but you would risk having a higher number of communication timeouts due to aborted commands. When a command is aborted the hand controller enter a state where it is constantly attempting to re-establish communications with the motor controller. When the motor controller responds to the re-synchronization attempts then normal operation will resume.
: You
can modify the retry value by entering a new value in the edit box beside
this button and then selecting the button. Normally
you should not need to modify this value. The
value you enter will be clamped between 1 and 500.
Version: The version number for the firmware in the hand controller is displayed in the upper right corner of the hand controller section.
Address: The address value displayed in the lower right corner of the hand controller section is the key value set by the dip-switches in the hand controller and motor controller. Each controller will only respond to commands coming from another controller with the same address value so the dip switches must be set the same in both units. This value is displayed so that you can easily see your setting. If your at a star party and having a high number of corrupted packets you may have your address set to the same value as someone else and be experiencing cross-talk between the two systems. This value will allow you to compare notes with other users in that event.
Motor Controller Section:
When the Motor Controller is working properly the status will display "OK".
Number of Corrupted Packets: This value shown in yellow in the Motor Controller section indicates the number of corrupted packets received from the Hand Controller. Each transmission packet begins with a known byte sequence which includes the Address set by the dip switches and concludes with two checksum bytes. Any packet that does not pass the checksum validation is considered a corrupted packet and is ignored. Incoming packets can become corrupted by receiving noise from another RF source such as a cordless phone. It is normal to see this value increasing due to rejected packets but if it is increasing very rapidly for extended periods of time then you may be operating in a very noisy RF environment and the performance of the RF interface may become affected.
Temperature Sensor: If the temperature sensor is connected and working properly the status will display "OK". Otherwise there is a failure or the temperature sensor is not connected and the status will display "FAILED".
Examples of possible failure scenarios:
If the Hand Controller is not communicating with the PC then both the Hand Controller and Motor Controller will show a "FAILED" status because the Motor Controller status can only be determined by communicating with the Hand Controller:
If the Hand Controller is communicating normally to the PC but the Motor Controller is not responding to the Hand Controller then you will see the Motor Controller status shown as "FAILED":
