Wixel wireless serial link breaks, won't restore after power cycle

Support Wixel
1

I have an autonomous robot that uses a Wixel pair to transmit telemetry back to my PC, using your standard Wireless Serial App, configured for 115200 Kbs on channel 128. This has been working fine for years, going through many robot version iterations.

Lately I have noticed that the Wixel link sometimes (but not always) drops when the robot connects to its charging station. When this happens, the red LED starts flashing, and the serial data readout on my PC freezes mid-sentence. The local Wixel’s LED’s stop flashing as well, indicating loss of signal. Power cycling the Wixel on the robot does not re-establish the link (see this video for example).

The only way I can re-establish the Wixel link is to power cycle the local Wixel, which makes no sense! The local Wixel doesn’t know what is going on at the remote end, or at least I hope it isn’t that smart! :wink:

I’m certain this is not a signal strength issue, as I have run this link over distances several times the distance at the time of the disconnect. Also, as a test I re-arranged things so the charging station was just a few feet from the local Wixel, and the same thing occurred.

I have noticed some other problems when the robot connects to the charger which leads me to suspect some sort of momentary power disruption is happening at the moment of connection, but I haven’t been able to run that down yet. However, that should not keep the Wixel pair from re-establishing the link once the power comes back up, or at least I don’t think it should.

Anything else I can do to troubleshoot this?

2

Hi, paynterf.

I moved your post to the “Wixel” section of the forum.

It does sound like there’s a subtle bug in that Wireless Serial App. Unfortunately, with the age of this product and our current staffing levels, this is not specific enough of a description of the problem for us to try reproducing it. It sounds like you do have other unusual things happening in your system at the same time as the Wixel problem, so perhaps you could debug those and at least prevent the situation that leads to this lost communication. Alternatively, you could try reducing your setup to something minimal that still predictably causes the problem so that we could set it up on our side.

Brandon