Lol, DJ. Ya, just call me Snidley Wiplash. Or maybe even Dudley Doright of the Royal Canadian Mounties.

Dave!!!

To bad you were not here to watch me do my Happy Dance! You did it brother, without your help I would have NEVER gotten this thing to work. Days and days were spent working on this only to be disappointed each time. You know what I mean ... lol. First off what I thought was a good tune, well, wasn't! Some of the encoder wiring was wrong. A stupid mistake on my part . Since the motors were bolted down I didn't see my mistake until starting everything over, a fresh start. You would think that in the Describe software if it seen the encoder ticks the wiring would be ok? Finally a good tune! Now I know what it should be like. The Describe program is and excellent piece of software, ToyMaker stated, the developer was a genius. Only trouble, too much to take in. I continued to try different things but STILL no love. You know how it is, changing this , changing that, after awhile who knows what you did ... lol. Just couldn't get everything to work with the Kangaroo/Sabertooth skill. After trying your program I left it alone and just focused on the K/S skill. That's where I went wrong! Some how changing this and that everything was in it's proper place. Tried the K/S skill but nothing. Tried your program and BAM, it started working! Tried the K/S skill and it worked now. Wait, wait, what? I was afraid to touch anything as it might break again! lol Powered everything down and tried again. The skill did not work but your program did. Found out that the skill would ONLY work after running yours. Tested this 4 times same out come. You mentioned that nothing would work until "start" and "home" is set. I believe that's the case here why the skill does not work (for me anyway). Would like to know how the skill works right off the bat for others? I don't usually give up on problems, in fact I always see it as a challenge. This one was a tough one.

Dave, thank you again my friend. You are a true asset to this forum!

Hey thanks brother! I appreacheate the credit. I'm so happy you were able to figure it all out and to get your system working.

The Kangaroo/Sabertooth is a wonderful solution if a person can stick with it. However, once it's working the way you want, it is rock solid with a lot of safety features built in.

I found everything has to be built and wired properly before it will even start working. I don't know why your Roo was able to finish a tune with your wiring messed up on the encoder. My guess is that it has something to do with the wiring being backwards. In the Discribe software there's a check box (under the Control tab). This tells the software that your system is wired in reverse. If it sees that you have your system wired in reverse during a tune that box will be automatically checked.

The other thing is in the Limit Switch section and Homing side selection in Discribe. You can change the direction that the motor moves by selecting "Inverted". However, if the Non-Homing side selection (Under the Position Tab) is set to the wrong limit switch relative of the Inverted motor setting the system will never move. This is because the Sabertooth only sends DC power in one direction at a time relative to how the Non-Homing side selection is set. I think. LOL. I know it's a lot to take in. I'll give you an example of a problem much like yours that I was having:

You're familiar with my B9 robot I think. I have a Kangaroo/Sabertooth controlling the two (car power window) motors that move the arms in and out of the robot's torso. Like I explained in an earlier post, I need to Start the roo channels first and then Home these motors before I can command them to move. Now, remember, the parked and resting position of my arms are all the way in and parked inside of the torso when the robot powers down and also after any arm animation move (just like the Hero Robot on TV's Lost In Space). After I got a successful tune, Roo had set these motors to move out of the torso to find it's first Homing limit switch at start up. Everything worked nice and I could command the moves. However I didn't want the arms to move out of the torso to find the homing side limit switch at robot start up. I wanted to keep the arms inside the torso at start up and home backwards into the torso. So, in the Discribe software I set both Roo channels to Inverted (in the Control/Advanced tab) so the system would run opposite of how it was tuned. After restarting nothing worked!! I think this was because it was now trying to home in the direction I wanted (back into the torso) but the DC power was still running the other direction?? Once I changed the Non-Homing side limit switch to L2 (Under the Position Tab. You have two choices, L1 and L2) the system homed in the direction I wanted and I had proper control.

It was hard to wrap my head around all that I had to do to get my system to work the way I wanted. Like you, I think it was a lot of trial and error along with some luck. I agree that this is a genius design but the documentation on all of the setting and what they do is limited and sometimes hard to understand. I think someone has to really understand how the Kangaroo fully works and how all the setting interact with each other to really take full advantage of all it can do. I contacted DE's Customer Support a few times asking questions about these issues I was having and how I could set the Roo up to overcome them. They were very quick to reply and tried to help but some of the advice I was given was completely wrong and didn't work. For example; the system will not move if it is shut down with the Non-Homing side limit switch depressed and is still in that position at start up. The system will however Home and move if the Homing side limit switch is depressed. I asked CS if there was a way to command the system to move the load off the Non-Homing side Limit Switch if it was depressed at system startup before homing. She said the roo will accept Simple Serial Incremental Position commands with the Non-Homing side Limit Switch depressed. I tried this and it would not move off the switch. So, my point is that there is so much here that even the experts that work with this little board don't know it all. LOL.

Sorry about the long post. Have fun now that your rig is running. BTW, what are you building?