Handy Board FAQ Answers: “help!”
My motors are going crazy and I can't download to my board! What should I do?
Calm, please—it's normal for the motor ports to come up in a random on/off state when the board has lost its program. The motor output latch must be initialized by a program on the board in order for the motors to be turned off, so if the program is lost, the motors will come up in an arbitrary state.
So the first thing to do is unplug your robot from the board. If you're having trouble downloading, you may as well “remove the whole patient” from your robot.
Next, make sure you have the proper RJ11 cable—the wrong one can do damage. See http://handyboard.com/faq/display.php?key=rj11 for info.
Assuming this is OK, now please perform the HyperTerminal/Loopback test at http://handyboard.com/faq/winindex.html. This will make sure your serial communications are working properly.
If all looks good and you're still not able to download, try another downloader. Not all downloaders work on all machines. See the list of downloaders at http://handyboard.com/software/util.html.
If you're still out of luck, see if you can borrow a known working Handy Board to test your set-up, or bring your Handy Board to other computer that's known to download properly.
Finally, if you're still having problems, please write a note to the Handy Board community newsgroup. Describe what you've tried and someone may be able to help you.
(Last updated 2001-04-09)