Subject:
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Re: MacNQC and RCX Troubles
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc
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Date:
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Sat, 30 Dec 2000 02:22:10 GMT
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Viewed:
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2168 times
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In article <G6CpoK.EEB@lugnet.com>, "Ray Sanders" <rsanders@svic.net>
wrote:
> In lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc, Bob Pariury writes:
> > I have a PowerBook G3 233mhz (I think it's a wallstreet; it's black with
> > the
> > big white apple on the front, first generation) with plenty of ram. I'm
> > also
> > running system 8.1. The green light on the IR tower comes on when I run
> > MacNQC and issue commands from the "test" panel, but I keep getting "RCX
> > not
> > responding" errors. The lighting in the room is not too bright, the RCX
> > is
> > plugged in with an adapter and pointed right at the IR tower. Check my
> > other
> > posts for more details (I'm kind of desperate). Thanks!
>
> Yep. Thats the exact same PowerBook that I have, even down to the speed.
> I
> never could get it to talk to the IR Tower. The same IR Tower would talk
> to the
> older SE/30 with no problems. It may be a volage problem, or it may have
> something to do with 'floating ground' state of the PB. Keep in mind that
> the
> serial port on all Macs is RS-422, not RS-232. Connecting it to an RS-232
> device
> is a bit of a hack. I believe that RS-422 is a differential voltage
> standard,
> while RS-232 is a single-ended standard.
>
> My only suggestion would be to look into an external serial port on a PC
> card.
> It *might* solve your problem.
>
> Ray
Actually, I think Bob's problems came from not having firmware
installed. Hopefully things will start working once he gets firmware
loaded. But there *are* cases of some strange serial behavior between
Macs and the IR tower.
My 300MHz Wallstreet II works just fine, and I thought the change from I
to II was minor (basically a speed bump for the processor and an upgrade
of memory/hd/display options), so I'd be surprised if Wallstreet 1's all
have this problem.
The IR tower itself can be a bit squirrelly...Fred Martin ran into some
cases where adding a serial extension cable got things working. This
was on a variety of machines, I don't recall the details, though.
I haven't been able to observe this problem myself, so I'm not exactly
sure what is going on. Although RS-232 and RS-422 aren't completely
compatible, its not obvious to me where things are going wrong with the
tower.
If anyone out there is having this problem and is reasonably familiar
with electronics, I'd suggest getting an RS-422 driver/receiver chip and
an RS-232 driver/recevier chip, and using them to convert the Mac's
RS-422 to RS-232 for the tower. If this solves the problem, then try
only converting the TX side (or RX side) so we can find out which side
is problematic. Once we understand the problem a bit better it may be
possible to fix this with a few discretes rather than a pair of
driver/receiver chips. If anyone is interested in tackling this, send
me e-mail.
Dave Baum
--
reply to: dbaum at enteract dot com
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: MacNQC and RCX Troubles
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| Thanks to everyone who helped out with my problem, it's much appreciated! The problem was not having the firmware loaded, which I was able to download to the RCX using the latest version of MacNQC. I had an earlier version of MacNQC which wasn't (...) (24 years ago, 2-Jan-01, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: MacNQC and RCX Troubles
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| (...) Yep. Thats the exact same PowerBook that I have, even down to the speed. I never could get it to talk to the IR Tower. The same IR Tower would talk to the older SE/30 with no problems. It may be a volage problem, or it may have something to do (...) (24 years ago, 29-Dec-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc)
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