Jon.Lasell Posted August 25, 2008 Share Posted August 25, 2008 Last year. many folks had problems with the USB driver hanging up in the middle of a show. Does LORII fix that problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Denny Posted August 25, 2008 Share Posted August 25, 2008 The only times I ever had that problem were when I was using a USB-Serial adapter. I did not get the one that LOR sold and it created a lot of hang-up problems. I changed last year to the USB-RS485 and did not have a single problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Jones Posted August 25, 2008 Share Posted August 25, 2008 I just recently purchased the usb-rs485B adapter and have had several problems, S2 was constantly crashing. I had to re-install lor 2.0.16 to get a working copy. My usb- 232 - 485 adapter worked fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon.Lasell Posted August 25, 2008 Author Share Posted August 25, 2008 I used both adapters (serial and 485), but it continuously hung up. All I had to do was unplug the adapter and plug it back in. But it got old having to go out every 10 mins to do it. I am hoping that lor2 fixed that. I worked with Dan but we never could get it working right. I will switch computers this year to CPU vice a laptop hoping that will help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Hamilton Posted August 28, 2008 Share Posted August 28, 2008 My 2 cents worth....Last year, I recall that when designing and running sequences on my development computer, I was having great difficulty for a couple of hours trying to get the USB 485 unit to work.The problem was that I noticed a couple other devices connected to my computer were causing it to fail. I had installed those two devices a couple months earlier. For some odd reason, one or both of the devices where assigning "virtual serial ports" that clobbered communications with the 485 device. By using the hardware tool (the software program that allows testing), I was able to go in and assign another port to the device and all worked well after that.On my Christmas display, I use a cheap dedicated computer so I never have any trouble.While there can obviously be many reasons for your device not to work, one place to check is in the control panel DEVICE MANAGER, and make sure nothing else is interferring with the virtual serial port that LOR uses. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LightORamaDan Posted August 28, 2008 Share Posted August 28, 2008 Jon.Lasell wrote: I used both adapters (serial and 485), but it continuously hung up. All I had to do was unplug the adapter and plug it back in. But it got old having to go out every 10 mins to do it. I am hoping that lor2 fixed that. I worked with Dan but we never could get it working right. I will switch computers this year to CPU vice a laptop hoping that will help.A few percent of users (that is a lot) reported problems with USB hanging last year. There are no changes in S2 that will improve USB vs the latest version of LOR1. I believe that 1.6.9 and higher have the same communications layer as S2.We have made some progress for a solution to USB stabliity. Older machines seem to work well but many newer machines do seem suseptiable to driver hang. We believe the cause is interference getting into the PC and causing "something" to happen which in turn causes the USB drivers to hang. The LOR software cannot "reboot" the drivers so the cable has to be unplugged.We have a noise injecter that can hang the the USB drivers on a new DELL PC in about 1 second. With a new, highly filtered USB cable (using the same LOR USB adapters) we can have the PC run for weeks without a driver hang. Now we do not know if this will solve every problem but we think it will help.We are still testing this.Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon.Lasell Posted August 31, 2008 Author Share Posted August 31, 2008 What is defined as a newer or old machine? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wbottomley Posted August 31, 2008 Share Posted August 31, 2008 Jon.Lasell wrote: What is defined as a newer or old machine?OS Platform (Vista, XP, 2000, 98SE)Speed would be a factor too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon.Lasell Posted September 1, 2008 Author Share Posted September 1, 2008 I was referring to Dan's comment about older machines. The computer I used last was a Dell Laptop (4 years old). Year before last I used a Compaq laptop (5 years old) with no problems.Everything I have heard about problems seems to be centered around Dell computers. Has anyone had success using Dell products? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Hamilton Posted September 1, 2008 Share Posted September 1, 2008 Jon.Lasell wrote: Everything I have heard about problems seems to be centered around Dell computers. Has anyone had success using Dell products?I can't imagine this being a manufacturer specific problem. Most USB circuitry is very generic and use just one of 3 or 4 brands of USB chips and system firmware. Dell doesn't make their own chips or circuitry. They get them from the same place that HP and other computer companies do.Having said that, I am not a fan of Dell and I don't buy them any more since they moved their support to India. I have two Dell computers (different models new and old) and one HP computer. They all work fine.Another note I'd like to make is that some problems can be caused by interaction with other USB hardware connected to the system that may have poor driver design. These are usually not WHQL certified.Simply put, there are just a lot of things that can interfere with the LOR and probably none of it would be the fault of LOR. I noticed that they use generic certified drivers. That's a good thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LightORamaDan Posted September 1, 2008 Share Posted September 1, 2008 Jon.Lasell wrote: I was referring to Dan's comment about older machines. The computer I used last was a Dell Laptop (4 years old). Year before last I used a Compaq laptop (5 years old) with no problems.Everything I have heard about problems seems to be centered around Dell computers. Has anyone had success using Dell products?This is total speculation. At some point one or more new USB chip sets were introduced that are now being used by any number of PC manufactures. That chip set is more suseptable to "something" that is happening within the LOR network. That "something" causes an event to occur that the USB drivers/hardware do not recover from. The result is that the USB device has to be unpluged to "hard reset" things in the PC.As mentioned a new cable seems to be making a very big difference. We will have more info soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Hamilton Posted September 1, 2008 Share Posted September 1, 2008 LightORamaDan wrote: This is total speculation. At some point one or more new USB chip sets were introduced that are now being used by any number of PC manufactures. That chip set is more suseptable to "something" that is happening within the LOR network. That "something" causes an event to occur that the USB drivers/hardware do not recover from. The result is that the USB device has to be unpluged to "hard reset" things in the PC.As mentioned a new cable seems to be making a very big difference. We will have more info soon.I agree. This makes a lot of sense! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bossgroove Posted October 2, 2008 Share Posted October 2, 2008 Do I have to wait until everything is set up to see if this is happening to me, or is there another way? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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