Resolved by DJ Sures!
Ok im having a head scratcher today. I connected Alan and Alena up to different laptops to run them simultaneously. One is an older Apple Mac Pro with bootcamp and Win 7. The other is an asus PC Laptop Win 10. Both are i7 quadcores both have 8 megs ram. Both are connected to the EZB via serial/usb using a osepp FTDI. Both are in maximum mode under power options:
BUT The Asus is running my recorders at half the speed as my Mac Pro. I have tried rebooting, changing com ports etc. I've killed and rebuilt animations with recorder, same issue no change. No background programs running either. Alan looks like he is in a slow motion movie "noooooooooooooooo"
When i move the robot over to the Mac running Win 7it runs at perfect speed as it should.
Question is:
What should I be looking for on the Asus that would be slowing down the data?
Ah yes - this could be one of three things...
Windows is not a real-time operating system. So the closest the timing can be calculated is within an acceptable tolerance defined by the cpu capabilities - and workload. So shut down as many apps as you can. Background processes etc.
the network driver could have a program running or virus scanner. Start from a bare bone windows install. Always bare bone otherwise no idea what is intercepting network packets
the cpu differences of threads and cores. ARC is multitasking and it may be sharing cores or threads waiting... I don’t normally experience this - well, never have experienced it. But it’s a chance if it’s not an I5 or i7 cpu. Any of the mobile cpus like Intel N or amd I’m not familiar with and can’t say how they’ll perform.
Thanks for the info. I think I’m going to pick up another laptop tomorrow. Something tells me something did not upgrade properly with win 7 to win 10 upgrade that happened to this computer a few months ago.
Can you install windows 10 from scratch? If the upgrade is valid, a full installation should be possible as well.
You can run task manager, or for more details resource manager to see if something is taking processor cycles or memory. From your description I don't think it is the comm port being slow, since once it receives a command, the EZ-B should execute it at the same speed, so actions could start late, but should run at the same speed once started.
Are both 64bit windows installs? Should not matter since ARC is 32 bit, but another data point.
Alan
@dj I could but this laptop is for all my 3D printing and has a lot of software. This was an upgrade and I remember there were some unknown devices (3) that drivers could not be found. It is possible they could be usb related. I’ve since uninstalled because I read somewhere that a reboot would reinstall. It didn’t. But I lost any info to look up. Also ASUS only has win 7 and 8.1 drivers on their website for this computer :/
@alan yeah first thing I did. Nothing chewing ram or using clock on cpu... very quiet.
Task manager can only show a queue of cpu messages of tasks. The "percent of cpu usage" isn't what most think - so you most likely won't see it in the task manager. Specially serial/usb communication and if the device driver thinks it's dooing it correctly
I've tried this out as well and play back is quite slow. A 15 second recording plays back at about 90 seconds. I'm running Windows 10 and had nothing else running on the computer.
Bob, can you give some stats of your computer. I would like to compare.