The Motorola MC3100 series has caused us a lot of pain lately. Users report the device is often slow and unresponsive. As we have a big project on the go, we've had very little time to pinpoint the problem so it was a great relief to see a download notification land in my inbox for an issue Motorola have identified with the barcode scanner.
Motorola have acknowledged the scanner takes in excess of 3 seconds to disable. In our .Net application we pass control from form to form and often disable and enable the scanner to do so. This seems to be the cause of our issue.
So once again we jump through Motorola's hoops to get the download filling out form after form and waiting for the download to be accepted by a support technician somewhere. (How they have the cheek to deny you these downloads unless you pay a support fee beggars belief. Essentially they are charging us to fix their broken devices!)
Once downloaded, we follow the Motorola procedure to update the device. The device performs a "Tepid boot" at the end (this is where the device seems to boot somewhere between a warm and a cold boot - the system does not display the cold boot screen or ask to re-configure the touch screen as it does on a cold boot but all our apps are overwritten from the cold boot section back to their cold-boot state)
Once the device is back online, our device scanners simply do not work.
We've spent time overwriting the OS on the device and starting again and it's definitely the update that causes the problem.
Anyone else experiencing this issue with SPR19400? As usual, Motorola won't deal with you as a customer - you must speak to the reseller who obviously have no idea about the update (understandably, to be fair - they are not Motorola.)
Update 1
Seems to be this "hot fix" doesn't work for our version of firmware (1.10.0006). An OS update to 2.17.06 fixed the issue (without the need for applying the hot fix)
Once again, Motorola fail to specify target OS revisions in any of their documentation.
Motorola have acknowledged the scanner takes in excess of 3 seconds to disable. In our .Net application we pass control from form to form and often disable and enable the scanner to do so. This seems to be the cause of our issue.
So once again we jump through Motorola's hoops to get the download filling out form after form and waiting for the download to be accepted by a support technician somewhere. (How they have the cheek to deny you these downloads unless you pay a support fee beggars belief. Essentially they are charging us to fix their broken devices!)
Once downloaded, we follow the Motorola procedure to update the device. The device performs a "Tepid boot" at the end (this is where the device seems to boot somewhere between a warm and a cold boot - the system does not display the cold boot screen or ask to re-configure the touch screen as it does on a cold boot but all our apps are overwritten from the cold boot section back to their cold-boot state)
Once the device is back online, our device scanners simply do not work.
We've spent time overwriting the OS on the device and starting again and it's definitely the update that causes the problem.
Anyone else experiencing this issue with SPR19400? As usual, Motorola won't deal with you as a customer - you must speak to the reseller who obviously have no idea about the update (understandably, to be fair - they are not Motorola.)
Update 1
Seems to be this "hot fix" doesn't work for our version of firmware (1.10.0006). An OS update to 2.17.06 fixed the issue (without the need for applying the hot fix)
Once again, Motorola fail to specify target OS revisions in any of their documentation.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this article, we've been experiencing reports of intermittent performance problems (in about the 3-4 second range) in one of our own apps running on this hardware and haven't been able to track it down, but it sounds very much like the scanner issue you mentioned. We're now looking to see if we can get hold of the OS update to fix it.
We have another issue though - our application assigns a custom font (actually the default font, but in a bigger size) to all our forms. It seems that on the 3190 (but not the 3090 or other similar devices) this causes the application to crash ("a serious error has occurred") when closed. The error seems to occur after our code finishes executing and cannot be caught and handled by us - worst of all, one this error occurs the application cannot be restarted until the device is cold booted. In fact, you can't access other parts of the system such as control panel until the device is cold booted - instead you just get an hour glass on screen that never goes away and the app never loads.
Commenting out the code that sets the font solves the problem, but our users don't like it because they find the larger font easier to read. Have you experienced this, and do you know of a solution ?
Thanks.
I can't say it's something I've particularly used, custom fonts, but it would point to something missing on the device that is on the other device (some drawing dll, the font itself may not be installed correctly)
ReplyDeleteMotorola like to change their platforms quite drastically between devices.
Have you tried displaying a web page on the device using the font to check it is installed correctly? Does your app install the font itself or use it as an embedded resource?