LOR Controllers Sensitive

[JeffBlan]

Be VERY careful with the cables you use with you LOR CCR controllers.

I think I had a bad cable that actually fried 2 of my controllers (the red light won't come on now). I had 1 go bad like this 2 years ago. That is why I test my cables now. Apparantly the cable tester that I have still doesn't quite test the cable completely.

I made sure lines 3,4,5 and 6 were all the same on both ends of the cable using the tester (tester can test 8 but I'm only using 4 with a RJ11 telephone plug).

I should have tested the cable between two 16 channel controllers first. When I do that, the 2nd controller's light goes out but they have something on the board so it won't fry.

The CCR's do not have this safety feature so now I have two fried controllers.

I opened a support ticket but I think I confused them some and they closed it (I reopened it). All I need are 2 controllers. Hopefully I will be able to get them. I don't need the ribbon lights as they are fine.

Anyone else have this happen? Anyone have a couple of CCR controllers to sell me? Looks like LOR is WAY behind and they don't have any in stock according to their online store. Hopefully they will get back to me on my support ticket so I can get the controllers only (don't want to pay full price plus if memory serves, they do take back any controller and you only have to pay 1/2 price for a new one).

Good luck and DON"T FRY YOUR CONTROLLERS! I may be without my arches this year because of it:-(

Jeff

[JeffBlan]

Well I saw in another post where you can order just the ribbons so I looked around and found where I can order just the controllers. They said in the support ticket they have a 7-14 day backlog. Hopefully they can get it out soon.

I'm still checking to see if they can only charge me 1/2 price.

BTW, anyone know what on the CCR controller board would get fried? Maybe I can repair what I have so I can have extras.

Jeff

[pyromill]

without having any ccr this is only a guess but.. I've seen on here many failures are because of the com chip.. what converts the rs485 into language the control chip understands. But I would check with lor on that one for sure unless you have some spare chips laying around and pending they are still socket-ed not surface mount

[JeffBlan]

Well unfortunatly no I don't have extra chips laying around. I will talk to LOR once the holiday season is over.

I wonder if we can construct something that we could put before the CCR that would be a saftey circuit like whatever is on the LOR 16 channel boards. They seem to have some type of protection from this issue.

Basiclly the bad cable is sending voltage down the wrong wire which causes the CCR controller to go bad.

[pyromill]

JeffBlan wrote:

Well unfortunatly no I don't have extra chips laying around. I will talk to LOR once the holiday season is over.

I wonder if we can construct something that we could put before the CCR that would be a saftey circuit like whatever is on the LOR 16 channel boards. They seem to have some type of protection from this issue.

Basiclly the bad cable is sending voltage down the wrong wire which causes the CCR controller to go bad.

just a hair brained idea buuuut I don't remember the specs on how much current can be drawn from the power lines of the network but it wouldn't take too much to make an isolated rs485 for each "node" small circuit board.. few parts.. or something like this for each controller.. I think a diy way would be way cheaper though.