Serial communication problem with RCB4 controller

[ozancaglayan]

Hi,

I've successfully built the KHR3-HV robot, mounted the RCB4 controller and plugged the SIO cables on it.

During origin setting, I was able to communicate with the controller using the given USB serial adapter using HeartToHeart.

But weirdly after the assembly, I only managed to communicate with the device only one time.

I have 2 battery packs which seem to be fully charged (verified with a multimeter).

When I turn on the switch, 2 out of 10 times the red and green LED lights up very briefly (~1 sec) and they go off. The other times no activity is observed on the board's LED's.

Once the HTH is opened, the neutral settings or home position settings are loaded and the Settings button is pressed, I keep getting "Device not found" error.

I also tried with Linux. Upon inserting the USB serial adapter the kernel recognizes the usb device. After that I load the ftdi_sio with the correct parameters and /dev/ttyUSB0 is created.

Then I built and tried libkondo. Although I don't know if the RCB4 controller has some motions built into it (I didn't do anything, didn't write anything to EEPROM, etc.) running ./run_motion 1 tells that the code received bad ACK from the robot.

I think that there is a communication problem but I don't know how to debug the issue.

Should I expect the robot to get up when I power it or will that be possible after writing some data to EEPROM, etc?

Thanks.

[ozancaglayan]

OK this was really caused by batteries. I plugged the board to a 12v DC adapter and it works.

Thanks anyway.

[limor]

so everything works including experiments with libkondo ?

[ozancaglayan]

I didn't go back to Linux yet but at least on Windows the robot works through H4H. I think my problem was that the batteries were not fully charged and the board couldn't supply enough power to servos.