I have attempted to use these fantastic boards in a commercial animatronics project but have had to stop using them due to one big drawback…they freeze if they receive an unrecognised rs-232 signal. This means that they cannot be used in live audience or unsupervised operating situations as there is always the chance that a spurious signal may sneak in stopping the whole presentation in its tracks…very embarrassing!..please build in an overide to this if a future board is able to accomodate.
Hello,
Thanks for the feedback. We’ve heard this complaint a few times before, so it will definitely be addressed in the next-generation controllers. (By the way, the reason we did it that way is that the corrupted command could have been a stop command, so the safest thing to do (usually) is to stop. If the controller quitely ignored data it knew was bad, you might have all kinds of problems going on that you might not notice until some critical time.)
With the current controller, you still might have two options. You can look at the serial output of the devices and monitor if they’ve stopped echoing your commands; if so, you can reset them. We could also customize the units for you to do something different in an error case.
- Jan