Robot Loses Connection

[BlacksmithWoods]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

The DS has a Charts tab which gives you two communications feedback values -- round trip time in milliseconds and lost packets. Can you summarize the plots or post a screenshot?

Greg McKaskle

Okay, we are working on getting the screenshots now. However, we also have another problem. On the DS on the Diagnostics tab we are getting a green light for joystick 1 when no USB Joystick is plugged in. In addition to that when the robot is off the green lights for DS Radio and Bridge are blinking on and off. Any suggestions?

[Greg McKaskle]

The diagnostics page does a few different things. It pings the ethernet devices and shows the results, and it shows whether it was able to identify and open a connection to a USB HID joystick or gamepad device.

My explanation for the blinking ping results is that another device not he network has the same IP address. You may be able to do a reverse DNS lookup and determine the other device. Or perhaps you should simplify the network to get rid of the cross-talk. Our office at work is also a 10.xx.yy.zz network, so this happens there. You generally fix this by turning off or disabling all of the LANs and WANs on the PC until only the one connected to the robot is enabled.

I don't really have an explanation for the joystick except that the PC drivers say that there is. Perhaps if you open up the control panel and go to the joystick section and see if it agrees. I have seen BT or wireless joystick adapters that "reserve" connections to devices that they own. I was a BT mouse set that claimed to be a mouse, keyboard and joystick all the time just in case you owned the other devices and turned them on.

Greg McKaskle

[RufflesRidge]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

My explanation for the blinking ping results is that another device not he network has the same IP address.

Greg, I don't think this is the case. In my experience these lights always flash green when the Diagnostics tab is left open, as long as the DS is connected to a network. I haven't tried Wiresharking to compare the green flash to the actual pings, but I would guess based on the frequency that the flash occurs each time the DS re-pings the devices.

BlacksmithWoods, I would recommend ignoring the DS radio and Birdge lights blinking. I don't think that is related to your actual issue.

[Greg McKaskle]

In my experience, they shouldn't flash. The exact command line being executed to ping is ...

ping -n 1 -w 150

When the Diagnostics panel is open, the pings are run on each device one after the other once a second and the display is updated after all of them complete. They shouldn't flash unless some of the pings timeout or fail. Perhaps there are other reasons for the ping failure, but in our office, every time I've seen it, it was due to conflicting IPs.

Greg McKaskle