Subject:
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Re: Communication problem
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.spybotics
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Date:
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Wed, 4 Sep 2002 20:01:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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5074 times
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Thanks for your responses!
The problem is finally solved - don't ask me how though :)
(Although I do have a suspicion - see below)
I'll leave a few notes on what I experienced in case someone else runs in to
the same difficulties.
First the final "OK-state":
Controller in remote mode (dial to the left):
- As long as any button is pressed the LED should light continuously (actually
it turns on/off quite a number of times per second, but that's almost too fast
for the eye to notice).
Controller in action mode (dial to the right):
- With no button pressed the LED blinks regularly and rapidly (about 3-5 times
per second).
Here is what I observed on my controller when it didn't work:
Controller in action mode:
- LED blinked irregularly, sometimes staying dark for several seconds.
Controller in remote mode:
- Sometimes a button push resulted in nothing (LED stayed dark), sometimes the
LED blinked irregularly a couple of times when the button was pressed.
In both modes the sypbot didn't show any response to the controller, so I
decided to check if the infrared LED (the big white one) worked at all.
If you have a web cam that's easy, because they're sensitive to infrared (at
least all models I know; e.g. the vision command camera works fine). Just hold
the controller in front of the cam and press a button; you should see a bright
white spot in the camera display.
Well - obviously my infrared LED didn't work.
As a last resort I changed the batteries, although I had inserted fresh ones
before; it still didn't work, BUT the (red) LED blinking behaviour changed.
So I kept fiddling with the batteries - swapping them around, changing the
order (NOT reversing the polarity of course :) ) - at one time the LED didn't
light up anymore at all, in another configuration the irregularities changed -
and suddenly it worked. Spybot reacted, and the web cam test clearly showed the
infrared LED lighting up.
I only have a suspicion, why swapping the batteries around helped.
If you look closely there is some kind of protection against inserting
batteries the wrong way: A small opening on the plus-side allows just the small
plus cap of the batteries to pass through and connect to the contact.
I suspect that the plus caps on some of my batteries were a little bit larger
than that of other ones (although they're all the same brand) and didn't fit
completely through the slit, thereby not having good contact.
Maybe that's complete nonsense, but the only explanation I can come up with.
Anyway, it works!
(at least until the next time I need to change the batteries :) )
--Alex
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Communication problem
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| (...) Alexander I got the same "problem" it seems the controller led doesn´t blink but if you look in the dark it does. Also I got during the controller setup the error message but after skipping this part everything seems to work ok. Much pleasure (...) (22 years ago, 4-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics.spybotics)
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