WebControl chain length warning during initial setup

I am getting the following warning scroll on the screen after doing the quick configuration, set sprockets to vertical and extending the chains on m 12 ft frame.

Message: Unable to find valid machine position for chain lengths 0.00, 0.00 Left Chain Length Greater than System Settings Chain Length LeftChainLength: 4104.43 System Chain Length: 3960

The 3960 mm chains I currently have appear long enough to service the entire work area,

My top beam length is 3630.6 mm, vertical motor height is 769 mm. Should I move on the calibration step, or do I need to change a parameter, first?

No, this needs to be fixed before moving to calibrate. Is this using holey calibration firmware or stock firmware?

edit: nm… this message is in holey firmware only.

I’m working on instructions at this point and I’ll say that it’s good you ran into a problem in the sense I know what trips people up (or maybe there’s a bug…)

After which step in the process did this occur?

Step 1: Set left sprocket vertical by rotating left motor
Step 2: Set right sprocket vertical by rotating right motor
Step 3: Define Zero
Step 4: Extend Left to xxxx (what value is xxxx?)
Step 5: Extend Right to xxxx
Step 6: Close

Yes, I’m using the holey firmware and version 0.916 of WebControl. Both the right and and left extend chains read 2032 mm.

I went to Actions -> Return to Center and the sled appeared to lower to approximate center of the machine. I then did a ‘Shutdown WebControl’ and restarted it. The WebControl screen now displays Alarm Cleared in the scrolling message window.

At which of the above steps did the error occur? After pressing ‘Close’ or somewhere earlier?

Nm… I see that message comes up as soon as define zero happens. Weird. I will research.

The only other thing I would mention is that the cross hair showed centered on the board after I extended the chains, but the reality was that the sled was 3/4 of the way up on the board. When I went back to Actions ‘Return to Center’ the sled moved into center position, the cross hair remained centered the whole time.

I think what’s happening is that once the chain lengths are set to zero, the controller is sending an error message indicating that it can’t figure out x,y coordinates that correspond to chain lengths of 0. This is reasonable sense there’s no way you could even connect the sled with 0 mm chain lengths. I think ground control basically ignores this message but I made it in webcontrol to throw up the error message without realizing it would appear on this screen. Generally, that alarm can be ignored at this point…

however…I’m also seeing an error occur when you press the adjust chain button which effectively breaks webcontrol’s UI processor. I’ll work on it and have release 0.917 today. sorry for the problem this caused. I think during documentation last week I cleaned up stuff that I thought wasn’t used and ended up deleting something that’s ONLY used when you push ‘adjust chain’.

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Yeah, that’s because the UI processor on webcontrol (the part that communicates between webcontrol and the browser) crashed because of an error. Everything kinda appears ok, but nothing ever seems to happen on the browser display… like position updates, etc.

Thanks for taking the time to work on this, your explanation makes sense. My Maslow now seems in a sane state. I just remembered my MDF backerboad is actually 49" x 97". so I went back and tweaked my vertical motor distance from 769 to 794 in ‘Quick configure’ and then noticed the cross hair was slightly above center as expected. I clicked on ‘Return to Center’ and the sled and cross hairs both moved back to center in unison.

I have a fix being built now. It should be up on github in 10-15 minutes. WebControl only checks for updates every hour so it might not notify you right away when its available.

Thanks for finding this… It was pretty much a show stopper for getting people up and running.

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