We have an urgent problem with arduino board which needs to be resolved for an arts exhibition in which it will feature in tomorrow.
We have a simple system which has a button which goes through arduino to trigger a flash animation on a windows PC. Everything works fine, but we have just discovered that after anything between about 2-5 hours, it just stops working. When this happens, it seems it is because windows is no longer recognising the presence of the USB arduino board. Simply unplugging the USB cable and re-inserting it fixes the problem. There are no errors in the serproxy command prompt, and everything works fine again after physically reconnecting the board (we don't need to restart any software).
We have set up various regular timed scripts to prevent this timeout, but they don't work. Even physically pressing the button regularly does not prevent windows from simply stopping to recognise the USB device after a few hours.
PLEASE PLEASE can anybody make any suggestions about what we might try to resolve this.
Erm. Excuse me I'm a bit of a noob with this, but I think the answer is no.
It's difficult for me to tell because I have to wait 2-5 hours for it to happen again, but I believe that when I checked this before it doesn't disappear from the device list, but I could be wrong about this - I'll let you know as soon as it happens again.
If it helps, during normal operation, the L and RX lights are blinking. When it fails, the L light is sometimes on and sometimes not (I believe depending on what state it is in when it fails). The power light remains on when it fails. Pressing the reset switch on the board does not fix the problem.
My best advice on this would be to grab a copy of Devcon from microsoft. Set up a scheduled task to disable the USB controller, wait several seconds, and then re-enable the USB controller. That's probably the closest you can get to software unplugging and replugging the USB cable.
Could you post your Arduino code? Even though you say it's simple you might still be causing some sort of overflow error after a while if some loop is not formatted correctly.
I'm really sorry for not replying earlier - with the madness of shipping it off to the exhibition, things have slipped.
I'm embarrassed to say that we resolved the issue simply by replacing the usb cable. I was sure that we had tried this previously, but perhaps we hadn't.
