The most likely situation is that the PC is stopping to do
something else which is disrupting the polling of the
G-Cube. If you are running W95 or W98 on a slower machine,
such as a 486/33 this is quite possible. In these cases, a
screen saver, or even just a Windows "clean up" cycle where
windows begins moving stuff around between the cache and the
drive can cause a loss of connection.
I've used a 486/50 quite well running W3.1, but I think that
the cycle usage assigned to the operating system under
W95/98 is much higher. While serial port communication is
handled by windows as a very high priority item, disk access
is even higher. Therefore if any disk operation is begun,
whether by windows or by the user, or a screen saver, etc,
while GEEZ is communcating with the G-Cube, it's possible
for the connection to be lost. On newer blazing pentiums
with lots of cache, this is rarely an issue. On older
machines running Windows 3.1 it's also not much of an
issue. But an older slower machine running ultra fat W95/98
can certainly experience the problem.
My suggestion would be to test this out of the car on your
desk and see what's happening. Just hook everything up like
you would be at the track. Go to AutoStart, and watch what
happens and how long it takes. Does connection get lost
only when the screen saver kicks in? When the loss occurs
is the hard drive being accessed by Windows with no mention
of why? (Probably Windows "housekeeping".) Once you can
isolate the problem and make it occur on demand, you should
automatically know how to cure it.
--Byron
VettPilot@aol.com wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> While in staging the GEEZ software frequently "drops ready" by going NO
>DEVICE.
>
> In order to overcome this condition I sometimes have to unplug the G-Cube,
>and the serial connector to get GEEZ to recognize the device, and begin
>polling again.
>
> I'm losing a lot of run recording due to this aggrevating condition.
>
> I'm using a 486/33 laptop w/ the G-Cube plugged directly into the serial port.
>
> Is the Cube losing power (ie not enough power going thru the serail
>interface)?
>
> TIA
>
> LarryC
> N3CIIE
> Black Dragon Racing
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