My students are working on a newly installed Flowarm PLTW version 4.3. This is my first year teaching with the robotic arms and the software, but I was successfully using it an older version of the software over the summer. When the students are programming the arms, the software tends switch to the Default program in the middle of them moving the arm. This is occurring on all of the computers for all of the students. I tried it on my laptop and had the the same problem. It does not make programming impossible for them, just frustrating and more time consuming. Am I missing something that will fix this issue? Is there some sort of trick? Am I the only one having this issue? Any help would be much appreciated.
Hi,
Oh well, I think I have a very good idea what is causing you this issue and the good news is, it can most likely be fixed very easily right away.
That being said, I will try and get a proper fix to the main download so that no one else has this issue in the future.
One of the new features of this version is the use of F keys (top row of the keyboard) and inputs E/F/G/H to trigger sequences (see this article, point #3).
The default setup includes 3 example sequences and the first one, “Default”, has its input trigger set to “H”. This means that if a signal changes on the H input pin of the SSC-32U, it will trigger the default sequence to play.
Unfortunately, if nothing is connected to the input pin H, then it is in what is called a floating state, which means that stray signals can affect it. Something as simple as passing your hand nearby can generate a trigger!
The easiest fix is to simply start by clearing all trigger inputs. See the image below for how to do so:
Also, if you decide to use the 4 new input signals (E/F/G/H), we recommend using a pull-up or pull-down resistor (whichever is the default value you want) to ensure the signal is more resistant to noise around it.
We’ll be updating the default example that ships with FlowArm 4 to remove this problem so that by default all trigger inputs are cleared/unused.
We apologize for this inconvenience and hope you’ll have an easier time using the software now!
Sincerely,
This seems to have worked. Thank you!!!