Hi all,
I just got my third EZB board installed in the brain of my B9 and hooked up to everything. On it's own it works great and I thought everything was going nice when I noticed a problem with the scripts I wrote in EZ Script. They were not running perfectly like before. The scripts effected when I connect to ANY board as the 3rd board are mainly the ones that get ADC values from Potentiometers that send back position feedback. I use this info to tell the script to stop the motor when a set variable is reached. (I use an H-bridge and DC motor to turn the waist and radar section that's mounted on a Lazy Susan and gear sets).
Before I was able to have the waist or radar section rotate and stop pretty much spot on my set variable and read from the pot. Now when I connect to any board as the 3rd board the rotation will shoot way past my set value or even seem to ignore it. The result is that the rotation till either go past and hit my limit switches or if it's trying to find center it will just rock back and forth till I stop it.
I don't know if my computer is to slow to handle 3 board connections, there is a problem with the Bluetooth connection or there is a bug in the software. Oddly, everything works great till I connect to a third EZB board. Then ARC seems to have trouble seeing the ACD value till it's too last and the reading is past my set variable.
I hope this makes sense. I'll attach a copy of my project and a video. Any input or help is welcomed.
B9 Robot Project: B9RobotControl.EZB
Here's the vid. It's over 8 min. Hope it's not too long:
I'll check that on the laptop and the Dongle. If your correct then class 2 is more powerful. Here's the power ratings:
Class 1: 100mW (20dBm) / 100 meters
Class 2: 2.5mW (4dBm) / 10 meters
Class 3: 1mW (0dBm) / 1 meter
Still it seems there's a bottleneck somewhere in the laptop with the built-in Bluetooth. I'll do some more testing today. Thanks guys.
Wonderful news.. I did as DJ suggested and disabled the onboard Bluetooth. I had to do this in my laptop's Bios at bootup. Then I installed the Bluetooth Dongel (it's usb 3.0 comply) into a 2.0 USB port and after installing softwear, adding devices and port asignments all is well on my Dell laptop that I want to use for robot control. Rotation, speeds and stop points are all there as I expect and as scripted. Hayyyyy!
As far as the laptop class of this Dell Inspiron 6400, I couldn't find a good answer. The online manual says only this:
internal PCI-e Mini-Card WLAN or WWAN support and Bluetooth® wireless technology support
One odd thing is the way the com ports were assigned for each of the 3 EZB boards. Not what I had expected. I had no choice to pick a lower port at the time it was installed. It just was assigned What I ended up installed are Com Ports 10 - 15 with EZB boards:
0 connected to com10 1 connected to com13 2 connected to com12
Odd but all seems to be running fine. Does anyone see any reason to feel uneasy about this?
Funny, windows has its own magical way of assigning com ports
The port number doesn't affect priority of performance. It's simply an identifier.
Thanks again for all the help. Everything is still running fine. I guess I learned today a little something about Bluetooth.