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Force Plate technical troubleshooting guide

Stian Eklund
  • Updated

This article covers how to troubleshoot force plate issues. Older Motion Plates such as Motion Plate 3 and 4 are not covered by this article.

 

If recognized by Windows, the plate will show up in Device Manager as USB Serial Converter.

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Common issues:

  • All 4 feet not properly touching the ground, issue with older plates with old style ground rail where the feet don't protrude enough through the rail, customer needs to make sure all feet are protruding through the rail.
  • Plate not showing up as recognized in Device Manager due to bad cable.

Rare issues:

  • Dead USB board, Seen with series: AM6147. Causes could be static electricity or lightning strikes etc.
    • When connecting the plate to the computer, no USB connected chime is heard, no device shows up in device manager. Swing Catalyst doesn't detect anything.
  • Noise on data channels, results in noisy data. (Often cause can be USB hub or adjacent USB devices on the same hub). Make sure the USB cable they're using has at least one ferrite bead (ferrite acts as a electrical choke and suppresses noise in the high frequency range).
  • If the supply power to USB is noisy this can happen. Also if the power supplying the computer is noisy this can happen on more data channels.

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Further examples of noisy data where the CoP trace has ripples as well as most if not all of the data channels. This is most commonly caused by powered USB hub's that have noisy switch mode power supplies.

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What can I do to fix noisy force data?

  1. If you're using a laptop, try to disconnect the laptop from AC power and record a new recording, does the noise go away? If yes this indicates there is some issue either with the AC adapter itself, or the mains power itself. It's possible that adjacent equipment connected to the same mains line can introduce noise into the mains wiring.
  2. If you have a powered USB hub or mains powered laptop cooling fan or other equipment connected to the computer that receives power from mains, try to disconnect / unplug this equipment.
  3. If no equipment in your studio /setup is introducing noise it's possible this is coming from an outside source. In these cases it could be valuable to have access to the local breaker box to kill power to neighboring equipment to aid troubleshooting further.
  4. Use cables with good shielding and have ferrite filters on them.
  5. Consult with an electrician.

 

 

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