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Troubleshooting carriage direction errors

SilverLinks 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

• Remove the carriage from the needle bed and look at the underside. At the front edge (the edge that is closer to you when you knit) there is a pair of magnets joined by a wire. These magnets must be able to slide freely backwards and forwards inside their plastic track. On an SK840 carriage this sliding distance is about 1 cm or 0.4 inches. If fluff or other debris accumulates in the tracks, this can stop the magnets sliding and prevent normal operation of the carriage. Make sure that there is nothing to stop the magnets sliding freely.
• Clean the optical sensors near each back corner of the carriage. They detect the movement of the carriage along the rail that contains lots of holes. Also make sure that there is no fluff or other debris blocking any of the holes.
• If you have the option for spoken instructions turned on, but the sound is low, it could be that you started to move the carriage while an instruction was still being spoken. Wait for spoken instructions to complete before moving the carriage, or turn them off.
• Examine where the curl cord plugs into the SilverLink. You should be able to move it very slightly with a little finger pressure but it shouldn't be loose. If the socket is wobbly it will require re-soldering to the circuit board: return it for repair. Try to avoid repeatedly plugging and unplugging.
• The point cams must be securely clicked into place at the positions indicated in Interactive Knitting.
• If the Silverlink works with one carriage and not with another, and the other carriage works with a different Silverlink, or an EC1, or a PC10, it may mean that the second carriage needs servicing: please see here for an explanation.
• How to prevent static electricity from causing problems is decribed here.
• Any excess length of cable should not be tightly coiled but should be arranged loosely away from other cables, in order to avoid electromagnetic effects.
• An important improvement was made in DesignaKnit’s use of the Silverlink 5 at version 8.09.03 (and before the release of DesignaKnit 9). If you are using this link please be sure to use that version or a later one of DesignaKnit.
• It may be worth trying a different USB connecting cable (to connect the link box to the computer). A cable with an intermittent fault can produce carriage direction warnings.

Problem description: while interactively knitting, a message sometimes appears saying that the carriage has moved in the wrong direction, when it has not.

SilverLinks 1 and 2

If a USB to serial converter is being used with a serial SilverLink 1 or 2, this is very likely to cause severe mispatterning and error messages about the carriage going in the wrong direction. The converter is not fast enough to keep up with the movement of the carriage at normal knitting speeds.

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Cable Link Manuals

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