Cut-down not responding to email

[jess]

Hey all! We're having a bit of a problem with our cut-down not responding when we send an email. Here are the steps we've taken (a number of times with the same results)

• Powered up ground station and iridium payloads and tested tracking as usual
  
• Powered on cut-down
  
• Opened Remote Configure NAL application
  
• Chose modem as 9602-LP 1.3-1.4
  
• Entered our IMEI and updated
  
• Changed pins in output pin states
  
• made two files: the first is cutdown_100.sbd and the other is idle_000.sbd to indicate which pin patterns are being used
  
• Pressed 'save SBD email' button and named as indicated previous step
• Opened up an email app (This might be the problem--I just used my own personal gmail, would this cause anything to go wonky? I can't see why it would, but I'm not an expert)
• Send an email to [e-mail] with sub as our IMEI, the body with nothing, and the attachment our cutdown_100.sbd file
• A few seconds after pressing send I receive an email from [e-mail] that read 'The following mobile-terminated message was queued for delivery: (our IMEI)/current time/correct filename/attachment size and a final line that read 'The MTMSN is 26, and the message is number 1 in the queue.
• Nothing happened with our cutdown blade. I pressed the motor button on the board and confirmed it was still able to spin. We waited approximately 15 minutes with nothing. I retried this two more times after unhooking/rehooking everything up and starting from scratch. The only difference is our message number on each subsequent try goes up one. We have 2 and 3 waiting in the queue currently.

I am wondering if anyone has any insight on why this is happening? I have not tested it while the antenna is outside, but we're going to try that in the morning. I'm wondering if our pins are incorrectly labelled? We have them set to 'set for pin 0, clear for pin 1, and clear for pin 2'. Thanks in advance for any help, it is much appreciated.

[jess]

Still no luck. My next option is to set files for each possible pin combination (100) (010) (001), to see if we can get one of them to work correctly. I would quite appreciate any insight if there is any, otherwise I will update at our next trial and will be listening in on the telecom conference on Thursday. For what it's worth, I did let it time-out to cut-down, which worked appropriately. We just can't get an email cut-down to work.

[irowe]

My best guess is that perhaps the cutdown you are using is not paired with the Iridium you sent the cutdown message to. As far as I know, the little Xbee radios that are used to patch the message from the Iridium to the cutdown are set up in exclusive pairs , so you may have them mismatched.

[jess]

Thanks for your reply. We finally got everything working this morning. The issue appears to have been a dying battery on the Iridium payload. We had the Iridium up on the roof of our building, and our cut-down with us on the ground station at the base of the building. When we powered everything up, our last queued messages went through. We then reset everything to see if we could watch it work in real-time. It didn't, so we went up to roof and realized the iridium payload had stopped beeping due to an almost dead battery. Powering it back on immediately caused the cut-down to work again (and play an awesome little star wars tune)!. Thanks again irowe, and hopefully this helps anyone else who might run into the same problem.

[jess]

Ok, So I would like to add to this that the black cut-down cord we were given to use doesn't have quite the tensile strength necessary to hold the cut-down to the payload. We went to do a test launch today and the cord broke and we lost one of our balloons. No worries because the cut-down did cut the cord as necessary, but the force of the wind strength being used wasn't that great. We have since changed to a cord similar to the seat-belt cord. It is quite strong and threads through much nicer. Just a head's up.

[David MSGC]

You really shouldn't have to change the sbd files, or worry about paring xbees, every single pair of xbees were tested for paring and functioning cutdown with the sbd files provided. We have found most cases of cutdown not working was wrong IMEI number sent in email, both occams not being reset, or the xbees are too far apart.

[jess]

Yes, the issue was a dying battery on the Iridium payload. Since it was so weak, it just died and we couldn't get the emails to be sent through. Everything with our cut-down is working fine now, except for yesterday when the black nylon cord broke during our launch. We changed the cord to a seat-belt cord, and everything is fine. We didn't have to change the sbd files, there was no issue with our IMEI, and we didn't have to update or change any hardware or anything. Thanks for everyone's input!