Possible RJ11 or RJ45 damage?

[keyboards]

Okay, I've searched the forums and can't seem to find a definitive answer to this, so I'm hoping someone might know.

I have 11 LOR1602W controllers driven by a LOR1602WG3-MP3 inside a tree with 185 circuits on it.  I was moving some wiring around and accidentally plugged the Cat 5 coming from controller 0b into the RJ11 jack (BTW, whose brilliant idea was it to put a RJ11 "interface" there with an RJ45 jack?!?  RJ11's are, by their physical nature, a 6-pin connector and not nearly as wide as a '45).  Both were then turned on.

When controller 0c was reading 'no conn', I went to inspect and found the error of my ways and shut them off.  However, I smelled something that approximated a very hot resistor or other component in the controller.  I shut it off immediately and haven't touched it, deciding it would be better to leave it off and find out if I fried something.

What say you?  Is this a possibility that it is fried?  Please let me know ASAP, as I have this tree to light this coming Saturday and I will need to FedEx in another controller if this one is shot.

Thanks for any and all replies!!

[k6ccc]

I'm really wondering about this since it's physically impossible to plug a RJ-45 plug into a RJ-11 jack.  I've never have even seen a 1602 controller, but I pulled up the user manual from the website, and the photos clearly show a physically smaller connector for the phone line port.  From what I recall previously reading here, the wiring is the same (at least from the same perspective) - the center two pins are the data, and the next two outward each direction from the center is the + and - power.

Am I missing something here?

As far as "is it damaged", that needs to be answered by someone more involved inn the internals of the hardware.

 

[keyboards]

Well, that's what I would  have thought too, but I re-verified this morning, that I could plug my RJ45 connector into the RJ11 connector on this 1602 box.  Now, because all of my other boxes were already sealed up (and I had a short turnaround time this AM), I didn't verify that this was an isolated occurrence or if it is how the boxes are assembled normally.  I do plan on finding out though.

The really good news is that the controller still works.  I verified that I wasn't seeing any 'magic smoke' and, although I could still smell some of the lingering fragrance of a possible electrical char, the controller logged up and tested fine by itself and with the other 11 boxes.  After this holiday season though, they're all getting pulled and very visually inspected before putting them away for next year.

Do you know offhand if there are schematic available for the boards?  I wouldn't expect to get any proprietary information about firmware or microprocessor programming, but the general I/O layout and output schemes would be a big plus for us techs out here (I've been doing component-level repair on pro audio equipment for almost 40 years now).

[cherran]

I had the exact same thing happen. Yes you can plug an RJ-45 plug into the RJ-11 jack on the 1602. Unfortunately the mistake was only noticed when the magic smoke came out of the box. I would like to know what my  options are for this box. Shipping it anywhere, with the additional tech repair charges would probably cost as much as replacing it with one of the plastic boxes ( which I could totally do now that I'm running ~98% LEDs) but I hate to just chuck it.

Can I get a new board? Does anyone know what component typically gets toasted in this situation? It seems there are probably more of us out there with this problem (Yes it's a doofus move but I'm owning it!)

Anyone else out there want to join the club??

[keyboards]

I know this is OLD, but I have learned something very important that I want to pass on...I was re-configuring the system and needed to do some further digging into the hardware a little deeper...

The RJ11 jacks are wired IN REVERSE with regard to the RJ45's

I did some reverse engineering on the connections and here is what I found...

RJ45 PIN 3 is connected to RJ11 PIN 5 - GROUND CONNECTION
RJ45 PIN 4 is connected to RJ11 PIN 4 - RS485 Data
RJ45 PIN 5 is connected to RJ11 PIN 3 - RS485 Data
RJ45 PIN 6 is connected to RJ11 PIN 2 - SYSTEM POWER +

Basically the circuit board is 'wired' this way.  If an RJ45 is mounted in place of the RJ11, hooking this up essentially "shorts' the system Power + to ground and vice-versa.  Also communications will fail because the RS485 data lines are swapped and will not understand the protocol because the '1's are interpreted as '0's and vice-versa.

I also verified that one of my controllers (0B) had (3) RJ45 connectors mounted instead of (2) RJ45's and an RJ11.

I've lined up the diagrams below to make it a bit more visual.

                                             

           

Edited October 24, 2019 by keyboards