Reporting Bugs / Getting help from Danaher Motion
If you experience a motion controller bug, Danaher Motion wants to fix it. You can contact us at:
Phone: 408.747.0496
Email: support@motioneng.com
To resolve a problem, we need some information in order to help you.
Description of the Problem
Describe the problem with anything you think will help us identify the problem:
- What did you expect to happen?
- What actually happened?
- What error codes do you get, if any?
- Does this happen on every machine, or just one?
- How do you cause the problem to occur?
- Is the problem always reproducible?
- Have you always had this problem, or has it shown up in a new version?
- Are there other programs that affect the problem?
Include any information you have about how to reproduce the problem:
- Do you have a procedure to cause the problem reliably?
- Do you have any sample code that causes the problem?
- If so, please describe how to use this sample code, if it is not from Danaher Motion
- Please include configuration information you have
Information About the System
- Please run version.exe and email the output to us. The output from this program includes information about your system that helps us duplicate the situation and diagnose the problem.
- We may need you to give us a memory dump from the controller for a difficult problem. You can take a controller memory snapshot by starting vm3.exe and pressing the F8 key or by running memoryDump.exe, before and after the problem.
- If you are using a GUI (graphical user interface) utility, please send us the utility's version number. Use the Help/About menu item to view the version number. For mpiConfig, use the –version command line option.
Further Troubleshooting Tips
- Isolate the problem down to as few variables as possible. Eliminate variables one-by-one until the problem goes away. Add the last variable back again and confirm the problem comes back. If the problem is intermittent, make sure to run each test enough times to confirm that the problem was truly eliminated and not just a statistical anomaly.
- Check hardware wiring, power, and connections. Intermittent hardware problems can fool even the most experienced troubleshooters.
- Review the Release Notes to see if the bug has been corrected in a later release.
- For MPI applications, add mpiControlMemoryToFile(…) to your application to automatically snapshot the controller memory when a failure occurs. See memoryDump.exe sources for an example.