My UCB testing problems

I have built and tested the Power Comms board with minicom and built and tested the UCB up to the point where I am supposed to use reprap-host to try the Stepper Exerciser.

Minicom communicates with the board fine, the PIC flashed fine, but when I hit Tools > Stepper Excersiser, I get a "Stepper Exerciser Exception: gnu.io.NoSuchPortException".

My setup is Ubuntu 6.10, standard serial port.

Any ideas?

OK that was easy...run as su and it works...sorta. Now I get the message in terminal that the "Device at address 8 is not present".

Device 8 probably isn't present :-)

Each card has a different address. The X, Y, and Z axis steppers are addresses 2, 3, and 4. The first extruder will have address 8, so you'll only see that if you have built and connected that board. For purposes of testing your stepper board, those messages are just warnings -- the stepper test should run fine with only one stepper board connected.

[www.reprap.org] has instructions on how to give your user access to the serial port so you can avoid sudo.

ok, now I get "sendMessage error - retrying" ad infinitum

check your connections... something may have wiggled loose. thats what happens when it sends a message and gets no response. i'm going to try and update the software to give you sane error messages when that happens.

Check that you jumpered the sync connector correctly, too. Someone (Nick?) recently reported strange issues with serial comms until this was done, here in the forums.

Jonathan

I've seen my board act that way a few times. The problem went away after I restarted the software a few times or power cycled the stepper board -- I don't remember which. I never really figured out what the problem was, it just started working on its own after a few minutes of messing around with things.

Just d/led reprap-host-0.8.1 and all is well... I have a blinky light on my UCB.

i highly recommend building a stepper tester board. its an excellent debugging aid, and you can even use it to test the heater or any TIP outputs. if it responds correctly, you can generally rule out hardware problems.

plus, theres 4 blinking lights then.

adkocher Wrote:
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> OK that was easy...run as su and it works...sorta.

This suggests you perhaps didn't follow the instructions about "Granting yourself permissions on your serial ports" which are part of the Wiki instructions at [www.reprap.org] ?

Can you please try doing what the instructions suggest regarding port permissions, and if it still doesn't work running the host software as a normal user, let us know, and also let me know what the output of

$ ls -l /dev/ttyS?

is?

BTW I'm glad 0.8.1 works for you, but I doubt it really fixed the issue -- we've not made significant serial port handling changes between 0.8 and 0.8.1 that I know of. You may just have done whatever it took to "get it to work", as another poster mentioned happened to his system??

Thanks,

Jonathan