GroundControl quits on load on Win 10

Troubleshooting
1

Good Morning,
I picked up a new refurbished laptop with Win 10 and McAfee on it. When I got everything loaded and hooked up to the Arduino, over a week ago, every time I started GC it would load all the way to the GUI and suddenly quit. I’d try to restart from the taskbar icon and windows would pop up a message saying the application was no longer there. Sure enough GC was getting deleted from the GC directory. Putting it back got it to work again. I had to poke around at Windows Defender and apparently stopped the delete behavior and was working though calibration.
Fast forward to yesterday. Windows had to do an update, initially I had the same issue and checked defender again, then it just stopped loading the GUI all together.

I deleted all the directories, unistalled the Arduino app and re-installed/reloaded. No joy.

Anyone have any thoughts here?
I’ll get the kivy log up later. the command line window only indicates completing about 5 steps.

2

It may be time to just go to WebControl. Can it do Holey Triangular calibration yet?

2 Likes
3

No. WebControl cannot to Holey Calibration. All these things are just a matter of time. There might be an ambitious Maslow user out there, who would like to do the work. Anyone? Bueller?

1 Like
4

You can still do the ‘regular calibration’, run the ‘drill holes pattern’, enter the numbers you measured in the .py script, change to the calculated settings and run WebControl ‘holey calibrated’, right?

2 Likes
5

That is a good point. Someone has mentioned that before. I am nervous about ensuring the kinematics calculations are consistent between the Firmware and the GC/script used to do the calibration.

I was thinking the intent of this is to simplify the Computer Science knowledge required to do the work. I thought running the script to be more computer science-y than installing and running Ground Control.

6

That’s the point i missed. Thanks!
For what it’s worth, the first time in 2 years x0/y0 is where i measured and marked it.

7

Create a new user as an administrator and try installing under the new user.

Thank you

8

One thing.

With Windows 10, it is not sufficient to just be an “Administrator” on the machine. Each process has its own rights that may default to non-admin.

To fix this, browse to the program=>right-click=>more=>run-as-administrator. You may need to do this with the Arduino IDE and GC.

9

Uninstall McAfee.

With windows 10, as a home user you can rely on the built in windows antivirus unless you’re downloading shady files from the darkweb.

McAfee and Norton are notorious for using lots of system resources even when idle and using near 100% cpu and ram when running a scan, which is something you do not want to deal with when sending gcode to a router for hours at a time.

As well, McAfee charges developers a fee to “whitelist” their applications, and they don’t always check to make sure the “whitelisted” applications are actually safe, so they have in the past allowed malware developers who paid them to have their programs run, while blocking smaller open source non-malware developers who can’t afford their fee.