ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Test equipment designed specifically for ANY-maze > The ANY-maze Activity wheel > Renumbering your Activity wheels

Renumbering your Activity wheels

Introduction

ANY-maze automatically gives numbers to all the Activity wheels connected to your computer. These numbers are sequential, starting at 1. However, ANY-maze can't know the physical order of the wheels on your bench, so it's likely that the numbers will be out of order.

Obviously, you could correct the order simply by moving the wheels around, but there's a much simpler solution; you can renumber the wheels from within the software.

How to perform the renumbering

When you have more than one Activity wheel of the same type (rat or mouse) connected to your computer, ANY-maze will automatically include a Renumber ANY-maze Activity wheels button in the ribbon bar on the I/O page. Selecting it will cause the Renumber Activity wheels window to open, which is used to actually perform the renumbering - see figure 1.

Figure 1. The window used to renumber Activity wheels.

To begin renumbering, click the Start... button in the window. This causes all the wheels to have their numbers cleared. At this point, you simply have to turn the wheels by at least 90° to number them. The first wheel you turn will be given the number 1, the second will be given the number 2, and so on. While renumbering, when a wheel turns by more than 90° your computer will beep, making it easy to know when to move on to the next wheel.

Details

If you keep turning a wheel after it has passed 90° ANY-maze will ignore you.

If you make a mistake, for example you turn the wrong wheel, then you can just click the Restart... button in the Renumber Activity wheels window. Doing this causes all the wheel numbers to be reset, and renumbering to begin again from 1.

When you finish renumbering the wheels, the window will show a message telling you this and you can just click the Close button to shut the window. In fact, you can close the window at any time, but if you do this before all the wheels have been given numbers then ANY-maze will simply finish the numbering for you and, of course, it will probably not get the order right.

If, after you start the renumbering process, you plug in or unplug a wheel, then the renumbering will be aborted and ANY-maze will automatically renumber the wheels (including the newly plugged in wheel) - of course, it will probably give them numbers that are not in order. However, a message will be displayed to tell you that this has occurred, and you can just click the Restart button to begin the renumbering process again.

In the unlikely event that you have a disabled Activity wheel connected to your PC, then YOU should exclude it from the renumbering - that's to say you don't need to turn it, indeed doing so will have no effect. When you have turned all the enabled wheels, the renumbering will end and ANY-maze will then automatically give any disabled wheels the next numbers in sequence (so they will always have the highest numbers).

ANY-maze help topic T1382