gateway and the SN163 problem?

[martinnossel]

I was using the SN163 board with the snap gatway (on a different PC to the one I am currently using for development), I loaded the McastCounter program and it was working with the gateway. I then reloaded Portal and powered up some node, Portal could not find them.


I put new 'out the box' radios in in all the boards and still nothing.


Now portal detects the synapse usb SN163 but will not find a bridge (no SNAP bridge device found), I plugged a serial port cable in to the SN163 and it detects the bridge.


I have spent hours on this and cant work out the problem, I have no schematics so I am stuck looking for a hardware problem. There is 3.3 volts on the power pin of the radio.


What could be wrong? (usb to serial converter) BUT the kicker is McastCounter.sln (McastCounter vb and gateway are working, with the USB cable??)

Oh &#&*&^ !!111

I just shut down VB and gateway and reloaded portal .... and it works... sob... I have wasted over 5 hours on this trying it on different computers.... diffrent radios .. could a bad shutdown on gateway have 'messed up the usb to serial' converter on the SN163



Martin

[mgenti]

I just shut down VB and gateway and reloaded portal .... and it works

So the VB example and SNAP Gateway were connected and talking to a SNAP bridge node the whole time? If so, then probably what happened was that the SNAP Gateway was advertising the same SNAP Network Address as what you had configured in Portal. This would prevent Portal from seeing the other nodes in your network. See the "SNAP Network Addresses" section in the SNAP Gateway Manual for more information.

[martinnossel]

The problem with that is when I moved the board to another computer I've been using for for months now and back to the test machine with gateway. I reset the sw on the radioand rest the nvram the sw on the radio, I tried 4 new rf units.

The 2 computers are linked to the same router, so I unplugged the computer without gateway's network cable, still did not work, I thought maybe the tcp/ip conetion was a problem (and still could be) I had stoped gateway running. I rebooted the test machine and reconected the board, and reran gateway and the vb program, and it worked again. (I would love to see the schematics of the snap board .... ) There was definatly a problem. I left a phone message early this morning with Synapse, after no reply and voice mail again later I reverted to this forum.

If its a SNAP Network Address problem why could portal use the board as a bridge with the rs232 connection and nut the USB?

If there is SW control over the USB bridge on the board, I think it was zapped by gateway while I messed with it and the VB program. (I had to shut down VB a few times as it became non responsive). This was maybe 'unzapped' when I did a 'proper' shutdown while checking 'the facts' before sending the first message.

Martin

[kbanks]

If its a SNAP Network Address problem why could portal use the board as a bridge with the rs232 connection and nut the USB?

Right, if one bridge node interface works but another does not, it is not a Portal address problem, it is a bridge configuration problem.

Only one interface on a bridge node can talk Packet Serial at a time. The default is the second serial interface (232 on our original bridge board). You can configure a node to default to the first serial interface (USB on our original bridge board), but if you Factory Default the node, it will revert to the second interface.

Also, regardless of the defaults, your scripts can change the port assignments. You can go from "talking" on one port to talking on a different port just by loading a different script (or just erasing the script currently loaded).