Hey Lumpy, we were talking about you. Were your ears ringing?

DE did get back to me. They say it sounds like a wiring problem. I did double check it all but it looks like I need to go over it all again. I bet I have a bad connection or wire somewhere.

Out comes the multimeter ! continuity at least Couldn't be too many ...4? 6?
Best of luck(make sure you visit those ice caves on Lake Superior at Bayfield) Glen

LOL Glen. The Ice caves of Lake Superior is about a 7 hour drive or more. With all the snow and cold we've had here in lower Wisconsin I have no desire to look at any more ice. I can make my own with all the snow and Ice I've shoveled. tired In fact I just spent the past hour shoveling. It's not such a bad thing until I think about the time it's taking away from my robot build and figuring out this latest challenge.

Well, I've got a few minutes now so it's off to the shop to find my muitimeter and check out that continuity thing you were talking about. If I don't find any obvious opens I'll have to pull the boards and check for cracked header pin solder joints. I may have cracked one when I tightened down the input connection screws.

I guess I've hijacked this thread a bit. However it was dead for awhile so I hope Lumpy doesn't mind.

I do have good news though! I've got my Kangaroo x2 wired in and working properly with the SendSerial commands. As I said above I did have this working once before and then everything stopped working after I hard wired everything into the robot with blinking error lights. The error blinks seemed to say I had something miss-wired. Not so! After going over everything many times and trying different combinations between power supply, batteries and then both, the problem turned out to be a position issue with the limit switches. Let me explain:

Before using the Kangaroo everything needs to be hooked up the way it's going to be run. Motors, position feedback device, power type and limit switches if they are going to be used. Then the board needs to be put through a "Teaching" session where it moves the motors to the limit switches (if used) and also changes direction and speeds several times.This is very cool to watch. After about a minuet (and if the learning session is successful) the board now knows where the limits of the rotation are, the speed of the motor and how much weight it's moving. It should then end up in the center position and halt knowing everything it needs to know about the system. The thing I was doing wrong was I needed to start this "teaching" session close to the center of the rotation. I was starting the session near to my limit switches and that must be what the blinking error message was trying to tell me. Once I moved the motor away from my limit switches and toward the center everything started to work again. Yah!

There are other oddities about using this board that I'm learning that I plan to reveal in a new and different thread. I want to do a Review / Tutorial on this cool little board. I think it could prove to be a valuable addition to bots of all sizes used along with EZB. I will share one thing now:

When using the Simple Serial language like we were discussing in the above posts I found I needed to send a "Start" command before things started working. Sometimes I had to send it twice. When the Kangaroo successfully receives this command the little yellow LED on board will quickly blink very brightly. It will then accept serial commands from EZB. This SendSerial command looks like this:

SendSerial(D14, 9600, "1,start", 0x0d)

Oh! One more cool thing! Not only can I move my DC motors now with this board combination using SendSerial commands in ARC scripts but I can also use the ARC's servo Controls or servo commands in ARC Scripts! I just pointed the servo commands or set the port in the servo controls to the one and only digital port I have the Kangaroo/Sabertooth attached to! I haven't attached a second motor yet but I should be able to run two motors like described from just one digital port (I think).

Cheers! Dave Schulpius

Thank you for sharing your experience with this item Dave. Look forward to any updates. Steve S

Thanks for the detailed info Dave.