smc04 lockups?

I have a few questions relating to the SMC04 High power motor controller. I am currently running 4 if these controllers with my own software. I Keep having lock up problems with the SMC04 controllers. My software is delaying 2 seconds at power up and then begins to send a series of 8 - 5 byte Hires packets to the controllers in sequence. Each packet represents a unique controller address. I chose $01-$08 as the addresses. I have the system running fairly well but keep getting crashes during operation. I have taken all of the normal measures to assure that noisy power sources are not the issue. I have kept the baud rate down to 9600 and have played with about every delay between packets I can think of.

Do you have any good examples that show how to best service these controllers in a multi unit buss in hires mode?

I also wondered if schematics are available for this board so as to have a better understanding of what I am looking at when the lock up tale place.

And finally once the controllers start to flash a failure is there any way to clear the error via the serial buss? In my application I cannot run a reset line to all of the controllers.

Thank you in advance.

Mschuckel

Hello,

Unfortunately, the schematics are not available for the board. However, the serial input just connects directly to the microcontroller UART input. The hardware reset is the only way to get out of the fatal error condition. Have you looked at the status of your serial line? If you have several units on one line, your signal may be getting degraded. You might consider using the RS-232 input, which allows for a higher voltage swing on your line.

If you need several of these units, we might be able to customize the firmware for you; please contact us if you are interested.

- Jan

Thanks for the reply Jan,

Sorry for my persistance, But I am also under a grest deal of preshure to resolve this. I have sense created our own software for this board. the software will receive serial even if it gets glitches. The glitches are ignored and the unit will wait for the next serial packet to ammend the positional values. Note: I am sending new values every 10 ms so a motor lockup is not an issue.

Best regards!

Mschuckel