Won't communicate with computer

Lynxmotion Electronics & Software
1

Hello all roboteers.

I finally purchased the SSC-32 and I’m having a little trouble getting it to work with a computer.

I have the SSC-32 a battery pack made of 4 AAs, a serial cable, computer and the lynx terminal. The serial plug is male-male so I am using a gender bender to plug into the computer.

I plug two servos into the board and connect power. The servos twitch and the light turns on. I plug the serial cable into the computer and open up the terminal and try a "ver ". Nothing happens. The terminal is on Com 1 and the board has all the right jumpers on as far as I can tell from the first diagram on the power sticky. I have even tried com 3 with another adapter I had lying around and still nothing.

This is really frustrating. Can anyone offer some help?

2

Have you verified that the com port settings on the PC and the SSC-32 match? This is often the cause of the two not communicating. Do you get echo back when you type the VER command or are you letting the terminal do local echo? You should not use local echo because you won’t really know if the device on the other end is receiving anything, or you will get double echoes if using local echo and the device is also echoing characters.

8-Dale

3

Nothing happens when I type VER. Is there any Com drivers that need installing? I’m running xp.

4

Whoops! there’s your problem. Male to male connectors is a tell-tell sign that it’s not your normal cable. :wink: It’s probably a null modem cable. You need a normal straight through cable.

5

I figured they would all be the same, obviously not. My cables called

Model: C-DB9-MM
Type: 2M DB9 Male/Male

So do I need a male-female cable? OR would a female/female cable work with a gender bender on it?

6

I found the source and it looks like it is a straight through cable, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps your gender bender is at fault.

7

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Thank you for your help. It turns out it was the gender bender that wasn’t working.

I was having trouble with commands in the Terminal but I worked it out that you can make any mistakes and rewrite them when entering commands.

Sweet, on to building my tank now :smiley: