Problems, problems, problems

Too many problems today. Just to summarize most of the problems that we have been encountering in the past weeks I can say that most of them boil down to the serial port connections. I still have to figure which is the component that fails, either the serial to usb conversion, or the usb hub, or most likely the Matlab interface, but anyway, the ports fail quite often.
Without reliable ports, no reliable timing and localization is possible; too many useful messages are discarded and the whole system will not work.
Today two of the ports fail after less than twenty minutes, so they started to report the upcoming messages without the proper temporal order. Usually you can deal with this closing and reopening the port; unfortunately Matlab crashed during the reopening attempt.

If this was not enough, I don't think the clocks on the sensor nodes are reliable.

We need to have a better strategy for the serial port connections, using something else rather than Matlab and understand which component is the real problem. We should control the beacons, so we could chirp on specified time instants.. therefore we would not need the clock of the sensors.

That's all for the week, have a nice weekend.