Anyone with any suggestions please !!! Problems with a light show setup that ran perfectly last year. Two houses, mine and my neighbors across the street with wireless Xbee control. My house on one Com Port (Ch 1-224) and His on another Com Port (Ch 225-392) with Xbee Pro Transmitters on each. My Transmitter has the USB to TTL adapter connected to Dirkneckle's Xbee Adapter/Transmitter Board. My neighbors has a Sparkfun Xbee Explorer Board. (all drivers have been updated for both)
I got everything connected and had problems. I decided to reprogram all of the Xbee's to make sure they were all on the same communication level. Surprisingly, some seem to have changed since last year and the baud rates and parity on a couple were different. Once I got all of the Xbee's reprogrammed, I checked the setup one house at a time by turning off the opposite com port in the Profile. My neighbors house ran like a charm.
I reprogrammed all of my Xbee's at a different Pan ID and my house seems to be working fine. Everything great, or so I thought. Once I ran both com ports together in Vixen 2.1, my neighbor's house is glitching and locks up. If I turn off the com port to my house in the profile, his works fine. If both com ports are active in Vixen, his is acting up again.
I had two of the Sparkfun Explorer boards as transmitters. If I replace his transmitter with the TTL adapter to the Xbee Adapter, it works but is slow and sometimes non-responsive. If I replace it with the Explorer Board, it works. As it is now, I can run one house at a time with no problems. As soon as both com ports are active, everything goes crazy.
Should I possibly un-enable all the open channels on the controllers on both com ports to lower the amount of data needed? I wonder if the com ports on my computer are not providing enough voltage to the transmitters. I have one transmitter connected to the mother board's USB port and the other to a four-port USB card I added to the Motherboard. The computer is about 8 years old, but is running Windows XP on a single core 3 ghz Intel Processor. I don't know if there is a setting on the com ports that need to be corrected, but I have included a link to some screen shots of the setting for each Com Port. I am beyond frustrated at this point and we have already delayed our show by four days. I used the same setup last year without a hitch! We added 104 channels this year.
I appreciate all suggestions as I am at my wits end with this !!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/138184.../shares/4K138N
I got everything connected and had problems. I decided to reprogram all of the Xbee's to make sure they were all on the same communication level. Surprisingly, some seem to have changed since last year and the baud rates and parity on a couple were different. Once I got all of the Xbee's reprogrammed, I checked the setup one house at a time by turning off the opposite com port in the Profile. My neighbors house ran like a charm.
I reprogrammed all of my Xbee's at a different Pan ID and my house seems to be working fine. Everything great, or so I thought. Once I ran both com ports together in Vixen 2.1, my neighbor's house is glitching and locks up. If I turn off the com port to my house in the profile, his works fine. If both com ports are active in Vixen, his is acting up again.
I had two of the Sparkfun Explorer boards as transmitters. If I replace his transmitter with the TTL adapter to the Xbee Adapter, it works but is slow and sometimes non-responsive. If I replace it with the Explorer Board, it works. As it is now, I can run one house at a time with no problems. As soon as both com ports are active, everything goes crazy.
Should I possibly un-enable all the open channels on the controllers on both com ports to lower the amount of data needed? I wonder if the com ports on my computer are not providing enough voltage to the transmitters. I have one transmitter connected to the mother board's USB port and the other to a four-port USB card I added to the Motherboard. The computer is about 8 years old, but is running Windows XP on a single core 3 ghz Intel Processor. I don't know if there is a setting on the com ports that need to be corrected, but I have included a link to some screen shots of the setting for each Com Port. I am beyond frustrated at this point and we have already delayed our show by four days. I used the same setup last year without a hitch! We added 104 channels this year.
I appreciate all suggestions as I am at my wits end with this !!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/138184.../shares/4K138N