I have been trying to take the Phantom setup on the road for about two weeks now. It’s difficult because the Phantom uses FireWire (IEE 1394) and it’s hard to find something small and portable that supports that.

My first attempt was to use my Mac Mini. Small. Cheap(ish). Ports galore. Using Bootcamp, I installed a copy of Windows Pro 7. That went well, but when I tried to use the Phantom, the system would hang when attempting to send forces. Reading joint angles was OK though.

I then tried My new Windows 8 laptop, which has an extension slot. The shared memory wouldn’t even run there. Access to the shared space appears not to be allowed.

The next step was to try an old development laptop that had a Vista install on it. The Phantom ran fine, but the shared memory communication caused the graphics application to crash. So I migrated the Windows 7 install from the Mac to the laptop, where I’m currently putting all the pieces back together.

It’s odd. It used to be that if you wrote code on one Windows platform that it would run on all windows platforms. Those days seem long gone. It looks like I can get around this problem if I change my communication scheme to sockets or something similar, but I hate that. Shared memory is fast and clean.

Slow. Painful. Progress. But at least it gives me some time to do writing…