- Both boards can be used on the same PC only if the B1/B2 switch on each board is set to opposite positions on each board.
- Use only the ADF7242 GUI to operate the boards. We had installed the ADF7023 GUI on the lab machine previously, but this is not valid controlling software and will never function properly.
- You must open two instances of the GUI on the controlling computer if using both boards on one PC. Each GUI must be configured independently, and both will open defaulted to control Board #1. The second GUI instance must be manually changed to declare Bard #2 before hitting "Connect USB" to begin operation.
- Make sure to open the GFSK tab on the GUI each time the machine boots. Default setup is IEEE 802.15.4 mode, and I have not located any GUI settings that allow the default transmission mode to be changed.
- The "Mode Settings" box on the GUI points to a configuration file for the GFSK communication settings. The default configuration file that populates on boot-up will not load the desired settings into the board. Blackrock has provided a configuration file for our desired 2 Mbps data rate. It has been placed on the lab machine's desktop under the "Blackrock" folder. I have not yet discovered a way to modify the default parameters for the GUI to make the boards load the custom settings on start-up. This change must be performed on both GUI instances prior to establishing a data link.
I ran through the motions in the user guide to test the link between the boards by declaring one as the transmitter and one as the receiver. I did not get the results expected based on the published instructions, so something is still not right. I did not try creating the link with either the default GFSK settings or the 802.15.4 mode. That will be my next step, as it could be an error in the custom configuration file.
The other issue that could be part of the problem is an IRQ failure. The GUI has a "Get Status" function that checks the state of the board, and I was able to get one board to light up all green, but the second board would consistently fail the "IRQ Status" metric. I haven't worked with IRQ settings since my DOS days in the early 1990s - when I was 12 years old. I remember them not being terribly difficult to manage, but I have not have time to dig deeper into Windows 7 IRQ management methods as of this writing.
I was also presented with an intermittent "Error 1172" window when operating the boards. The error pointed me to the Microsoft Developer Network portal on the web for handling some class of NullException, but I was not able to divine any kind of reasonable action that could be taken immediately to resolve the issue.
I took a screenshot of the error message and pasted it into a Word document held on the lab computer's desktop, for archive purposes. I would like that to be standard operating procedure for any error messages encountered by any of us moving forward. Please, always take screenshots of software failures and paste them into the error log with a brief description of how they happened. This will give other team members a chance to look over the errors in the future for resolution, as well as provide fodder to fill up PowerPoint slides for design review presentations and next year's Technical Open House slide show.
Hopefully one of us can make out what the path forward is on that error. I believe that this failure may be related to the IRQ status failure.
