Half dead Netlinx box?

Joe

Last week we had some pretty severe weather up in the Northeast, and a customer's system went down. He's got this thing pretty well insulated with surge protectors and battery backups, but when things came back online, the weirdness started. It seems the core of his NI4000 works fine, but the ICSNet and ICSHub are not showing activity, and the 3 expansion cards do not report into the Online Tree. The ethernet port still works, though.
Anyone run into this before?

Thanks!

Joe

cma

It's definately possible, lightning does alot of wierd things. I've had EQ that seems fine at first and doesn't really show any problems until days or weeks after a strike. What I would do first is wipe everything out and reload firmware and then the program and any other files. I would disconnect all connections and tie an ICS device that is in known working order directly to the ICS port (thus bypassing the possibility of damaged on site wiring and devices) and see what happens, and so on with every other connection. Like I said before it is entirly possible that like you said half of it works and half of it doesn't.

Reese Jacobs

ICSNet Problems on NI-4000

I had a customer in South Carolina with a NI-3000 based system whose house was hit by lightning last summer. The system continued to function following the lightning strike with the exception of devices connected to the ICSNet/ICSHub ports. All of the serial, relay, contact, and IR devices worked fine as did the Ethernet connection but ICSNet was non-functional. The unit was returned to AMX and repaired and is back in service.

We utilized power conditioning and surge protectors and they did a good job of preventing more extensive damage to the NI-3000 and other devices. We theorized that the lightning strike actually came through the HVAC equipment since there was A/C damage and all of the ViewStats were damaged beyond repair. In fact, we are fairly certain that the surge was introduced onto the ICSNet bus from the ViewStats and this is in fact what took out the ports on the NI-3000. We were fortunate that the other ICSNet devices (DMS keypads) were not also affected.

We generally use the ICSNet surge protection panel (Transtector/AMX) for all of our customers and it would have certainly helped in this case but the customer was cutting costs and did not want it included in the system due to price. This would have offered protection for all ICSNet connections as well as the NI-3000 ethernet link.

Reese

DHawthorne

Check your device addresses. I've had an NXI chassis lose it's address; it had been set to 5003 (third one on the master), and had inexplicably changed to 32001. That, of course, made all the ports on it inaccessible. It was easy enough to fix, and never repeated on that system (in over a year now). I never did figure out what caused it, but I suspect power flucuations of some sort.

JDaggitt

NI-4000 ICSNet Hub Zapped

Joe --

It looks like I may have a NI-4000 with the same problem that you reported regarding the lost ICSNet Hub. Bad weather with lots of lighting and now we can't see any of the DMS Keypads that are connected via the ICSNet Hubs. We've bounced the system a couple of times, connected each of the hubs directly to the ICSNet Hubs port on the NI-4000 to see if one of hubs might have gone bad. No luck.

The one bit of good news is that a DMS keypad connected directly to the ICSNet port came online correctly.

It looks like everything else is still working correctly we are seeing system message that show RS-232 traffic. We can connect to the NI-4000 over tcp/ip.

If you manage to get the ICSNet Hub port working, please post a message. Will do likewise.

-- Jack Daggitt
HouseMixer.com

Thomas Hayes

Lightning is strange stuff, I've seen it pass right through some stuff and take out stuff farther down the line. Friday night we had a bad storm and just the ESD was enough to scramble my DSL for the night (right in the middle of playing WoW to boot). Back to your problem, I have seen this and it was a blown chip on the ISC NET bus. Your client might want to look into a surge arrest protection system for his the house AC/breaker box.

DHawthorne

Thomas Hayes wrote:

Lightning is strange stuff, I've seen it pass right through some stuff and take out stuff farther down the line. Friday night we had a bad storm and just the ESD was enough to scramble my DSL for the night (right in the middle of playing WoW to boot). Back to your problem, I have seen this and it was a blown chip on the ISC NET bus. Your client might want to look into a surge arrest protection system for his the house AC/breaker box.

I am unconvinced that it is possible to completely protect any system from lightning damages. As you said, it does strange things - the potential is just so huge that it has the capacity to skip around elctronic systems seemingly at random (I'm sure it's governed by such a complex system of natural laws that for all practical purposes, you may as well consider it random). After all, it already traveled several miles through an insulating material - why should your dinky little varistor stop it? Surge protection can only limit secondary damages. A direct strike is not something we can really do anything about.

Way back when, I used to install alarm system. I had a customer that ran a lawn-and-garden shop in a rural area; his site included a storefront, a shop, and a warehouse in seperate buildings, connected by some underground lines. He took a direct hit somewhere on the property - I don't think it was one of the buildings, because there was no structural damage. I think he had lightning rods as well, and they may have helped, but much of his electronics, including the alarm system, was fried. When I went over to evalute what needed to be replaced, I was quite impressed how discontinuous the damage was. The main board on the alarm panel was cooked - in places you could see the lands on the circuit board had vaporized, naturally bypassing all the spark gaps, varistors, and fuses. Every bit of surge protection on the board was intact and undamaged, as were all the external devices I had installed (mostly Panamax stuff), but the board itself looked like it had taken an acid bath with entire sections peeling off or entirely gone, where it wasn't just charred. The installation had a half dozen or so motion detectors; all but two were perfectly fine, and those two inoperable; yet they all were powered from the same source, and connected to the same input board (which also was fine). Ninety percent of the reed switches on his doors and windows were also intact, but the ones that were not were just glass envelopes with a metal coating on the inside from the vaporized switch; in one case, the glass itself was shattered. Yet the palstic cases were fine, and not an inch of the 24 ga. wiring that spanned hundreds of feet leading to them showed any sign of stress.

Since then, I always tell my customers that surge protecton is just a way of trying to limit lightning damage. It's no guarantee of protection, just an attempt to hedge the bet. If you take a direct hit, nothing is going to protect your gear but sheer luck or divine intervention, however you care to look at it.

Thomas Hayes

I must agree with you Dave, protection from lightning and it's ESD is nearly impossible. I have seen some nice surge protectors but like you say these can only help to a point.( it's hard to protect from a million voltage + strike with equipment that has cable that is rated at a few hundred)

Joe

Followup

Thanks for all of the replies. The NI4000 was sent back to AMX and repaired, but when I went to reinstall it, I found that every device that was connected on a 232 port was not working. These included a Lutron Homeworks controller, a Dwin scaler and a Sunfire preamp. Apparently the surge travelled out the 232 lines and fried the ports on the remote equipment.

Joe

Thomas Hayes

Don't you just love lightning damage. When I worked in the private field and we had a strike like that we would recommand the replacement of all electronic equipment that was damaged and the equipment that it was plugged into that maybe/ or may not be working because it would be impossible to say if it would die a few months later. Just a thought.

DHawthorne

Joe wrote:

Thanks for all of the replies. The NI4000 was sent back to AMX and repaired, but when I went to reinstall it, I found that every device that was connected on a 232 port was not working. These included a Lutron Homeworks controller, a Dwin scaler and a Sunfire preamp. Apparently the surge travelled out the 232 lines and fried the ports on the remote equipment.

Joe

Ouch. I've seen that too. B&B Electronics makes some decent RS-232 isolators and surge protectors for this kind of thing; I try to get them in any job where the lines are connecting any equipment that isn't all in the same room.

ericmedley

Reese Jacobs wrote:

I had a customer in South Carolina with a NI-3000 based system whose house was hit by lightning last summer.

I'm currently working with a similar problem in a downtown Charleston, SC home. Same deal. Lighting or power surge from HVAC repari guy (time frame of problems starting actually implicates the HVAC guy more than lightning.) burned up several ViewStats with accompaning mini-verters. Also got one of two ICSNet Hubs and the NetLinx Master card as well.

Note: this system did have the ICSNet surger protector. Stuff still got burned up. bottom-line with all things power, you are never safe.