batsford Posted December 6, 2012 Posted December 6, 2012 (edited) I have a USB 485B with voltage booster. Last night after finishing with my mega tree, I plugged everything in to the controllers. I just had one box plugged in (each box has 2 x 16 channels: total 32 channels in each box) with a cat 5 cable to each controller. I plugged in the cat 5 cable from the USB485B to the controller and the USB485B was already plugged into my computer then I powered up the controllers and started the hardware locator - just to run a test on the tree. The hardware could not locate the controllers and I started to smell something shorting out. The USB485B was very hot, so I opened it up and found the chip CX LM 26 62M was fried.I don't know what I did wrong or what happened. This is the fourth year of running the equipment. You don’t know how important that little box is until it goes out! I am replacing the USB485B with voltage booster and usb cable.Any ideas why this might had happen? Any ideas how to avoid this happening again? Edited December 6, 2012 by batsford
Max-Paul Posted December 7, 2012 Posted December 7, 2012 Had to give this one a bit of thought. I dont know all of the details about this adapter, so I am going to take a few guesses. first is the most common reason. There was a short on your comm cable. LOR only uses pins 3, 4, 5, & 6. 4 & 5 carry two of the 3 wires needed for the actual communications. The 3rd wire would be the ground which I believe is on pin 3. You might be able to get by without the 3rd wire, but I had a problem without it. The wire on #6 is about 9VDC. I would first start out testing your Cat5 cables for a short, then might be a bad comm chip or anything that might be on the board shorting it out?
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