Messages

Yeah, veroboard is a piece of art in itself. It looks like there have been repairs done on the controller board, because the cables in the IDC power connector on the veroboard have been cut and the soldered directly to the veroboard. I will have to do a proper job to rewire everything. It's an utter mess.

This makes a lot of sense now. The placement kept degrading over prolonged usage of the machine. I think that the poor connector got hotter and hotter until the resistance increased so much that there was not enough power supplied for the motors. I noticed it yesterday that machine started fine, but then by the end of placing 10 panels it started making noises again. Also makes sense why machine was struggling to place at higher speeds.

Thanks for all the tips phonoplug. Very very much appreciated! It does look that the stepper motor controllers should be intact, just a matter of sorting out proper wiring. Have plenty of KK crimps, just need to order now suitable housings, lot's of proper thick wire and get on with full rewiring :-)

phonoplug, it looks like you were right :-) For some reason didn't notice this yesterday, but probably because I didn't look thoroughly as this is right on the side of the bottom of the case! This is the very first wire that comes from the board with a huge cap. Would be very grateful with any suggestions on what would be the best course of action next :-) The connectors now have to be replaced. Probably have to check if the board is OK too.

http://agileinnovative.co.uk/other/rv1s-control-box-failure.jpg

http://agileinnovative.co.uk/other/rv1s-control-box-failure2.jpg

http://agileinnovative.co.uk/other/rv1s-motor-controllers.jpg

http://agileinnovative.co.uk/other/rv1s-toroid.jpg

Mike, will do the tests you suggested. Thanks!

phonoplug, I'm not sure about the motor box type, because I haven't seen any other types apart from mine. It does have a huge toroidal transformer in it, but just one. The connectors are indeed IDC and I will replace them with crimped ones. Did you use crimp housing for the connectors? Would be great to know the part number.

Mike, thank you very much for your help! I think it was a dodgy power extension lead I used to connect the machine. Replaced it with another high quality one and the machine runs a lot smoother now. The machine is placing the components a lot better now too! There is still buzzing on X axis, but only at higher speeds and a LOT less noticeable. Still bugs me though! I'll contact you directly about hybrids. Would like to have some spares just in case as they seem to be not easy to get a hold of.

I now highly suspect that the issue may be with power. Changing the extension lead has proven to be a significant improvement. Don't have a clue about power wiring in my office, but will try to buy or make a beefy power cable to connect the machine from a power outlet on the wall. It's currently connected to power socked on the wall between the two rooms in the office and I suspect that it may be not up to the requirements for the machine.

Had a look at the internals of the power control box. Would like to eliminate the issue with the stepper driver module. Is it safe to swap those modules around for the machine or are they calibrated for the axis?

Made a video of everything discussed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOUajRDRBQM

Video is in three parts: moving by hand, warmup and moving using the controls on the RV place. The last bit hopefully will show what I mean. It's not quite grinding, more like buzzing sound, but I don't get the same sound on the Y axis.

I can't tell the exact difference when moving the arm by hand. It sort of feels slightly different, but I can still move it freely.

Measured the resistance and I do get a few ohms as suggested. Tested both X and Y motors.

Thanks for the info. Will try to make a video if possible to show what I mean.

Can't tell right now as I'm out of the office. Will check this first thing tomorrow morning. Is it safe to move the arm when the machine is turned off or should I diconnect the arm connectors first before moving it just to be a bit more safer?

In RVPlace I use the control menu to move the arm.

I think my RV1S has a problem with the X axis. I can definitely hear a different sound when I manually move the machine in X direction (technically when I move more for the X motor rather than Y). Y movement sounds very smooth, but X has this grinding sound Mike mentioned in one of the other posts. I've seen Mike's video about fixing the hybrid module, but before I go that path does anybody have suggestions on how to diagnise the actual fault?

I've been using IDA Pro and custom script I wrote to get the information without hooking as this was the fastest method. Seems that 303 is rotation address.

Attached debug log when rotating by 900. All numbers in hex.

OUT 303, 80
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 20
OUT 303, 10
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 8a
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 20
OUT 303, 10
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 84
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 81
OUT 303, 4f
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 84
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 89
OUT 303, 47
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 82
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 83
OUT 303, 4d
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 84
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 8a
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 84
OUT 303, 46
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 80
OUT 303, 40
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 20
OUT 303, 10
OUT 303, 0
OUT 303, 81
OUT 303, 44
OUT 303, 0

IDA Pro is capable to generate readable reverse engineered pseudo code for all functions.

I've hit a road block with generating a proxy DLL. Win98 does not want to load rvplace.exe and it complains that it can't find the exported functions even though dumpbin shows them correctly. The proxy DLL loads just fine with rvplace.exe on Win XP and up. Tried to compile the DLL with VC6 and MSVS2005 on Win98, XP and 7, but I end up getting the same error message.

I'm using genwrapper which you can find here: https://github.com/floodyberry/genwrapper and you can find more details about the implementation here: https://floodyberry.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/generating-dll-wrappers/

However, it generates incorrect def file that needs fixing in order to compile. LMK if any of you would be interested to have a look at the implementation and I'll upload the source code I currently have. My first step was to generate a basic DLL that forwards all functions and gets loaded by rvplace.

My next step to solve this is to inject a DLL in to rvplace.exe process and hook functions dynamically. This way I should be able to hook any function within rvplace.exe and any library it loads without the need to create a proxy DLL. This is somewhat a challenge as hooking functions in Win 98 is very different than hooking on NT based Win version with CreateRemoteThread, however I'm sure I will be able to solve it. Just need to get the basic Hello World thing going with injector and injectable DLL :-)

Made some good progress! It's just a start of course, but a very good start. The communication with the DSP board takes place in stepDsp.dll file. There are two functions that do the low level stuff:

Stepdsp::OutPort(int, uchar)
StepDsp::ReadPort(int)

As described by Jason, the addressing is done at lowest level with IN OUT assembly calls. This happens at addresses 0x00402F5B and 0x00402F84. The board is addressed over ports 0x300 - 0x303 and during initialization for the board, the application sends 0 to each port, then sends a sequence 0x80,0x40,0x0 for each port again.

When you click on the user controls for the machine to move by 1 to the right, the data sequence looks like this:

# right 1
OUT 302, 8A
OUT 302, 40
OUT 302, 0
OUT 302, 20
OUT 302, 10
OUT 302, 0
OUT 300, 80
OUT 300, 40
OUT 300, 0
OUT 300, 20
OUT 300, 10
OUT 300, 0
OUT 301, 80
OUT 301, 40
OUT 301, 0
OUT 301, 20
OUT 301, 10
OUT 301, 0
...

Didn't check the IN requests, but they should have ACK responses from the board. I suspect that 80-40-0 sequence is a deceleration for the DSP board which is handled automatically within software.

I'll write a proxy DLL for the stepDsp.dll so that I could log all interesting function calls in sequence and capture parameters. Then it's just a matter or playing around with the machine, capture the output and analyzing the communication. There are about 4 levels of abstraction within the machine and the one described above is the lowest level. There are classes to handle feeders, arm movement, nozzles, calibration, job processing, imaging and etc.

This opens up a huge amount of possibilities. For example, it should be possible to write a device driver for the DSP board, proxy the stepDsp.dll to another DLL and handle all communication with the DSP board via the driver this way making it possible to run the software on Windows XP and up. Alternatively it should be possible redirect all DSP board requests to a USB device as Jason planned, because all communication is a super basic direct addressing of IO ports.

I've read somewhere that DSP board has internal COM ports too? Does anybody have any info regarding them?

I'll keep updated with the progress.

Any suggestions on a reasonably priced 16 channel logic analyzer?

I've got the LeCroy Logic Studio box (software you can download free). I'm not entirely sure whether I want to lend it out, but conversely I don't know how much help I can offer as my skillset isn't in the domain of PC software. Hmmm. What would be involved, and how long would it likely take?

It's difficult to tell at this point. I think that hooking into the application and logging all communication at the lowest level would beat any logic analyzer, because it's possible to get a lot more information about the application and it's states. I will let you know if my primary method of getting the communication protocol fails.

Looks good. Will buy it as a last resort if I can't hook into the application which seems doable.

Thanks, will crack the feeder open and will have a look what's going on.

Any suggestions on a reasonably priced 16 channel logic analyzer?

I had a play with IDA Pro this morning. It provides a lot of information about the internals of the application, classes and methods. It should be possible to hook into the functions on a live machine and this way log the communication with the ISA board.