suddenly our hppr has gone nuts, and i would appreciate any hint on
what's going on, and how can it be solved, or rather, if we have to
wait until friday, when the Bruker engineer will come.
configuration: ARX-400, HPPR preamplis, XWin-NMR 1.2
it was last wednesday, late in the afternoon, running a batch of exps
at low temperature (265 K). All the experiments for the 1st sample
went ok, but, when we replaced it with the 2nd one, all of a sudden
our problems began.
1) we no longer were able to see the lock signal on the screen. Actually,
we could barely see it during the first swept, at the next one it
was gone for good. We tried reseting the BSMS and the CPU/4 to no
use. Also, we were not able to observe a FID (yup, sweep off mode ;-)
since it was late and one of us was about to miss the last train,
we left home
2) thursday morning i found that nothing has changed, still i coulnd't
see the lock, neither a FID... a whole reboot seemed to be a good
first approach... and after rebooting, everything came up without known
errors... and when i started the xwinnmr, well, what else? the system
panicked :-(
never mind, another boot and... at least the /etc/inittab file was
gone, and who knows what else, because i couldn't boot. After a call
at Bruker-France, the conclusion was that i would have to install
unix and xwinnmr from scratch, and so i did
a. installed new unix (friday)
b. restored backup tape of the whole disk (friday)
c. since unix(tape) was older than new unix, upgraded unix (friday)
d. installed xwinnmr 1.2 (monday)
boot again, configure the spectrometer and, after some pain, we were
glad to see the lock signal back on the screen. Indeed we were able
to record a 1H FID, only 1H, because...
3) now, the hppr seems to have gone nuts, we have spent all day reseting
it, testing it, looking in vain for patches related to the hppr...
nothing.
since all other rs232 channels were working fine, we discarded the
rrs-server/rrs-client as the source of problems. Also, moving the
hppr rs232 cable to another channel in the SIB didn't make any change.
thus, we were coming to the conclusion that it had to do with the hppr
itself, that wasn't responding to anything (sleep mode?):
a. it doesn't adjust the light intensity of the leds on the display
b. it doesn't respond when setting a different observ. nucleus
(edsp or eda + ii), it only sees protons
so i decided to measure the volts at
a. J2 to see if they were responding to the change of observ. nucleus
surprisingly(?) they didn't seem to make sense. I would expect
a +/-19V pair of pins, some GNDed pins, and one (OBSERV) maybe two
(LOCK) pins at +5V, but they all seemed to be at 1.5V ...
b. i also checked the voltage of the 19pins cascode connector, and
there's something with the RPC line that might explain it all. To
my knowledge, the RPC line should be at 0V and only when triggered
carry a pulse... but it was all time set to a certain voltage
(don't remember, ca 4V?)
IS IT OK?
after all, the hppr seemed to be in the 'sleep' state, ie: not
responding to stimulus like light, rs232 signals...
4) of course, a sequence of events like this, couldn't just end at this
point. It had to continue.
after closing the lid and plugging the console cable to the hppr, it
has definetly gone mad:
a. all lights on
b. and now, it doesn't respond, not even to the buttons on it :-(
and i say it has gone mad and not simply dead, because by plugging
and unplugging the console cable, some leds are turned off (amusing
itself?)
In summary, if anyone has seen this before and knows what's going on
(ie ICs magnetized, IC dead, Aspect3001 board asking for a replacement)
and how to fix it, we would appreciate knowing of you.
Thanks in advance, and best wishes for your Bruker toys,
Miquel
Miquel E Cabanas ---------------------------------------------------
Servei d'Espectroscopia de RMN (SeRMN) i Dept. de Bioquimica i
Biologia i Biologia Molecular (BBM) - Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona
Edifici Cs. Cerdanyola del Valles, 08193. Catalunya - Spain
(SeRMN) Tel: 34 3 581 1947 - 2291 Fax: 34 3 581 2291
(BBM) Tel: 34 3 581 1707 - 2154 Fax: 34 3 581 1264
e-mail: miquel@proton.uab.es
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