FBL2360 USB vs Synaptics Touchpad

I'm having a strange problem trying to talk to my FBL2360 (latest firmware) over USB using my Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop. The connection is somehow unreliable. Sometimes Roborun+ reports 'No Comm Port found"....sometimes it says "COM3 found" and everything works fine. When in the former state, the fact that the USB cable is connected between the powered-up FBL2360 and the Lenovo X1 causes the Synaptics touchpad on the Lenovo to misbehave horribly....as if both the USB connection and the touchpad are using the same I/O port somehow. THe cursor jerks around spastically and moves by itself as well. Disconnecting the USB cable from the Lenovo instantly restores normal operation of the touchpad. When things are in this state, plugging in the USB cable does NOT produce the usual Windows "happy sound" that indicates a new USB connection. And Roborun+ continues to say "No Comm Port found".

sigh.....

Thanks, Blake

I am running v 1.6 7/19/2016.....but I expect I don't have the USB driver. I downloaded the file from the page you linked and unzipped it. When I try executing the 64 bit version, Win10 pops up and says, "This App can't run on your PC". When I try running the x86 version, an old-style Windows dialog says, "You have to run the 64-bit version of dpinst on this machine".

attached is a snapshot of my system info.

P.S. This computer came with Win8 and has been "upgraded" to Win10. That might be a clue to my problems.

Well, I'll be.....

That worked! I mean the driver appears to have installed correctly. I have yet to see if my USB issues are resolved.

I hope you can excuse me for not trying it before. My computer has an Intel processor, not an AMD processor. Can you explain why the Intel64 driver will not run on my computer and the AMD one will run?

Maybe yall should rename the drivers one.exe, two.exe, and three.exe and change the instructions to recommend trying them all.

Scott

No change at all!

I ran the AMD version of your USB driver (on my Intel laptop) and it reported a successful install. But when I plug in the USB cable that is connected to my FBL2360, my Synaptics touchpad "goes crazy" in a manner that suggests some sort of crosstalk between the two. When I move my finger around on the touchpad, the cursor moves erratically and various Win10 menus pop up on both sides of the screen. Fortunately, my Lenovo Thinkpad also has the little "eraser head" joystick in the middle of the keyboard and that still works fine....so I launch Roborun+ and it says "No Comm port found".

This is the same behavior I had before I installed the AMD driver on my Intel machine (recall that the Intel driver program will not run on this machine).

BTW, when I plug in an ordinary USB mouse to this computer, I get the "new device added" tone and the mouse works fine. I get no tone at all when I plug in the FBL2360....but the touchpad goes crazy.

Scott

I would like to add that this bizaarre problem is somehow intermittent. With this same Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop, I have successfully used Roborun+ to configure the FBL2360S. In fact, I have my little car working reasonably well right now. But when I try to reconnect to the FBL2360S to make minor changes in the configuration, I now run into the spastic touchpad and No Comm Port Found error from Roborun+. I have no idea what causes it to switch from working OK to not working. I've tried power cycles to the FBL2360S and rebooting the laptop. No improvement.

For a while I thought it might be a USB cable problem. I've tried 3 different cables and, one time, the cable change happened to coincide with a period of proper operation.....so I jumped to that conclusion. But now all three cables behave the same.

Unfortunately I don't have another PC handy that I can use for testing.

Scott

Well, I FINALLY obtained another PC to try talking to my FBL2360 and it's confirmed. My particular Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop's Synaptics touchpad "argues" with the FBL2360 and various things happen. The worst is that the touchpad doesn't work and Roborun+ says "no comm port found". The best is that both work just fine. In between is Roborun+ does communicate with the FBL2360 but the touchpad "goes crazy" jerking all over the screen, bringing up side menus, etc. etc. Fortunately, the X1 has the little eraserhead joystick in the middle of the keyboard and that still works in this third mode.

Anyway, a Dell laptop just works perfectly. But I learned something else when switching computers. Apparently the names you give to the inputs and outputs in Roborun+ are NOT stored in the controller. I had to re-enter the names on the Dell. I went back to the X1 and got it to work one more time and, yes, my names were still there on the original computer. So they are somehow stored in Roborun+ even though I never saved a profile to disk (that I know of).