I did talk to tech-support today, and he said they did recognise the trend and will not charge for repairing this problem. Even if the unit is out of warranty.
Kevin D.
Great. We just spent $1200+ to have 3 of our units repaired. Wonderful. I'm actually looking forward to my next conversation with our rep.
I think I must be having this issue too with a brand new NI-3100.
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However port 3 TX never flashes but the output light does and I get no equipment response so there is definetly something spooky going on.
From what I read, if you have the cap problem, YOU WILL SEE TX LED flashes. It's the RS232 carrier voltage that fails, that does not stop the data voltages, hence the 422 communication still working after the cap failure.
I had a look in an NI-3100 and the power circuitry layout has been shuffled around somewhat. It looks like the capacitor in question has been re-designated from C155 in the NI-3000 to C206 in the NI-3100. Whether the same issue still exists in the NI-3100 is yet to be seen. If it does, I don't expect we will see it for another 18 months or so (Dec 2011?).
I've just repaired my first NI-3100 (with through-hole LEDs and old-style capacitor). Auser's technique for removing the old capacitor works a treat. Just make sure you have your side cutters down low on the capacitor, on the "lip" at the base of the aluminium cover.
Before I did the repair I noticed that the other NI-3100 devices (relays, I/O, etc) were NOT responding, but the IP touch panel was working as expected. I'm sure the failing/intermittent RS232 resulted in a massive amount of traffic on the I2C bus (as the reliability wobbles back and forth over the "working" threshold), locking up whatever thread in the CPU that handles the I2C traffic. So in this circumstance, there was no response from the LEDs on the front panel. A power-cycle cleared the issue temporarily.
I'm sure I've seen the LEDs working in the past while the RS232 was faulty, so I put it down to a series of failures.
1) The port starts behaving intermittently, and you will still have LED indication on the front panel.
2) As the capacitor fluctuates back and forth over the "working" threshold, a large amount of I2C traffic is generated. Devices appear to respond in a sluggish manner.
3) The intermittent behaviour eventually crashes the I2C-handling thread, resulting in no more I2C traffic. This results in no serial whatsoever, no relays, no IO, no LED indication.
Comments
Great. We just spent $1200+ to have 3 of our units repaired. Wonderful. I'm actually looking forward to my next conversation with our rep.
From what I read, if you have the cap problem, YOU WILL SEE TX LED flashes. It's the RS232 carrier voltage that fails, that does not stop the data voltages, hence the 422 communication still working after the cap failure.
I've just repaired my first NI-3100 (with through-hole LEDs and old-style capacitor). Auser's technique for removing the old capacitor works a treat. Just make sure you have your side cutters down low on the capacitor, on the "lip" at the base of the aluminium cover.
Before I did the repair I noticed that the other NI-3100 devices (relays, I/O, etc) were NOT responding, but the IP touch panel was working as expected. I'm sure the failing/intermittent RS232 resulted in a massive amount of traffic on the I2C bus (as the reliability wobbles back and forth over the "working" threshold), locking up whatever thread in the CPU that handles the I2C traffic. So in this circumstance, there was no response from the LEDs on the front panel. A power-cycle cleared the issue temporarily.
I'm sure I've seen the LEDs working in the past while the RS232 was faulty, so I put it down to a series of failures.
1) The port starts behaving intermittently, and you will still have LED indication on the front panel.
2) As the capacitor fluctuates back and forth over the "working" threshold, a large amount of I2C traffic is generated. Devices appear to respond in a sluggish manner.
3) The intermittent behaviour eventually crashes the I2C-handling thread, resulting in no more I2C traffic. This results in no serial whatsoever, no relays, no IO, no LED indication.
Roger McLean
Swinburne University