amosthedog said:
I think as a last resort i will send for a replacement cable (Grin cable purchased from Amazon Prime) to see if that is the issue.
I'll let you know if a new cable works, if not i guess I'll just give up -sigh-
It could be the cable (though I have two and neither has had any issues yet, even when used for other projects with an adapter I made for the phono jack to db-9).
One other thing you could try is to unplug and replug the phono plug of the cable into the CA's jack several times, just to be sure it's not a poor connection somehow. You can also use a good light and maybe a magnifying glass (or a phone with these options on it's camera, with good close-up function) to look inside the CA's jack for debris that could be shorting the terminals inside.
Oh, also, does it show the "PC Connection" message if the cable is plugged into the CA but not into the computer? (This is what I suspect, and indicates a definite problem in either the CA or the cable).
Or does it only do it if it's connected to the computer?
If the latter, does it only do it if the setup program is running? Or does it do it even without that running, just plugged into the powered-on computer?
If the latter, does it also do it if plugged into a USB hub that is *not* connected to the computer (assuming the USB hub has it's own power supply from the wall)?
I don't know exactly how the CA "knows" it has a PC Connection, if it just waits for a certain code to be received over the serial RX line, or if it waits for that to be grounded for a certain minimum period. But if it's the latter, then a short in the cable from the RX line to ground would cause what you see, and prevent the CA from "hearing" the setup program talking to it.
I don't know why Grin would give up trying to help you, since it appears that everything on the computer side of things is working ok, and it is probably a hardware issue with one of the two Grin products involved (CA or cable) that's causing the problem. What specific steps did they have you try? (Knowing those will help us help you try different things, and not waste time repeating tests already performed).
Grin is sort of correct in that you don't "need" the pc connection / setup program to use most of the features, but there *are* a few things you cannot correctly set in it without that (at least, there's no way to *see* that you set it correctly, as high values in some things are displayed wrong, some as zeros for instance), and you can't update the firmware if they ever come out with a new one with bug fixes or feature updates (been about a year-ish since 3.14 now, so I don't know when they'll come out with 3.15 for some bugfixes, etc. (per this post by Justin_LE https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1478762#p1478762).
A big advantage of the setup program that I like to use is to be able to experiment with multiple different setups of the CA, without tediously going thru all the onscreen menus to change everything each time. For instance, if you wanted to have presets for speed limits, but no other limits, you could try that out, and if it didn't do what you wanted quite right, then you could create a new setup based on that in the setup program, and then save that separately (so you can go back to what you started with easily), then upload to the CA and go test it out. Then if there's stuff that still doesn't do wha you want, you can agian tweak it in the seutp program, and so on.
And you can go back to any previous setup at any time, and you can also backup whatever setup you presently have on the CA to the computer, so you don't have to write it down by hand on paper, just in case you have a problem and have to start over for some reason.