and the moral of the story is!!

[Ford Prefect]

Its been a tough week for me Astrowise, I had decided that over the Christmas break I would try and get the observatory completed however the weather and technical issues have conspired against me. Things started well, managed to get the two 5m active USB cables connected to each of the mounts and EQmod all working well, then I decided to connect the cameras using a powered USB hub, this is when things started to go wrong.

Once I connected the Meade DSI and EQdir module to the hub and fired up the laptop I started getting messages on the laptop informing me of a power surge on the USB hub, then everything just stopped working! So after changing all the cables and still no luck I started to fear the worse, either the eqdir module had blown or the board in the mount had blown.

So as in all situations like this I gave my mate a call, who kindly came round to day with four boxes/bags of cables and connectors to try and prove my worse fears had come true. So we plugged in his eqdir and USB cables and everything worked fine, so I thought it must be an issue with the Eqdir module, so we tried that with his cables and it all worked fine!!! after all that it turned out that the powered USB hub had blown the USB to serial adapter!!

Unfortunately it looks as though its blown the Meade DSI too so if anyone know when I can sent that to be fixed it would be greatly appreciated.

So the moral of the story is

1) never use a USB hub without surge protection

2) always have SteveL's mobile number on speed dial

[jgs001]

Sounds potentially very nasty, but thankfully not too bad (although tis a shame on the DSI)... Where and how would you surge protect on that ?

[Ant]

blumming hell mate. That really is bad news, just when everything was coming together!

Maybe Andy at Astronomiser could help with the DSI? Failing that I guess it might be a back to BC&F (I think they are the main Meade dealers).

So apart from the DSI it's just a USB/Serial adapter that's gone? thats so much better than the mount going...

Anything I can do let me know.

Cheers

Ant

[Glider]

Surges/interruptions on the power to Meade DSI have been known to apparently erase/corrupt a part of their internal memory. This memory holds information read by the Windows programs controlling the cameras. Programs like Envisage then fail to 'find' the DSI.

Could this be what you are seeing or do you think it is real physical damage?

I have 'read' that if this is the case you run envisage on your PC with the camera connected and enter the chip in your camera at the command line, for example;

For new DSI II color,

envisage.exe ICX429AKL

For original DSI color,

envisage.exe ICX404AK

etc, depending on camera and chip used. This rewrites the memory and then the camera is able to be used again.

I have never tried this so please check by Googling and make your own decision.

[Ford Prefect]

Sounds potentially very nasty, but thankfully not too bad (although tis a shame on the DSI)... Where and how would you surge protect on that ?

Hi John

Some hubs have inbuilt surge protection it was just the ones I was using didn't

[Ford Prefect]

Cheers glider, I'll check that might as well give it a go, nothing to lose now.

[Glider]

Good luck.