IFI loader problems

[Robostang 548]

Hi,

I have been having some trouble with the ifi_loader and the "No robot found" error. I took my teams 2006 controller home over the summer and used IFI_Loader on my old laptop (300mhz compaq presario) and had no problems. In the fall I bought my new laptop and got a usb to serial converter. I had only loaded about 2 .hex files on both our 2007 and 2006 controler. When I loaded those 2 .hex files, I noticed that the .hex files loaded a lot slower than on my old laptop (probably becuase of the converter). Today my team met to teach our new members programming and such. We went to program the robot using my laptop and the first time it loaded (incredibly slow though) but after that, even when we were sure that the cables were connected and that we were in program state, it refused to load the .hex file and kept raising the "No robot found" error. We pressed the reset button then opened a terminal window to find that we were indeed connected because we were reciving items we had set to printf to the program port. So we put it into program state but it kept raising the same error. We tried programming the 2006 controller to have it raise the error some of the time but we could get 1 or 2 .hex files to load. I havent tried loading the program from another pc or from one that has a built in serial port. I tried some of the methods in this thread http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44024&highlight=ifi_loader+proble m. One method in the above thread about holding down the prog and reset buttons for a certain time did begin to work. But the resolution to the problem in the above thread was faulty soldering with the program port as determined by IFI, but I dont think that is the problem I have. Any Ideas would be greatly appreciated. My thory is that because I am using the converter and because the converter increases load time, maybe IFI_Loader is timing out when trying to establish a link with the RC.

-Don