Daisy Chain Olsen's not working

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davdue

Member
I have two Olsen's daisy chained. Separate power to both (not through RJ45). No jumper on J1. First Olsen works fine until I plug the RJ45 jumper into the in of the second Olsen. I have a spare Olsen and it does it on both. I have checked the RJ45 jumper and it is fine. I have even swapped it out with another good one. What happens is the first Olsen freezes up whe the second is plugged in. If I unplug the jumper it starts working again. Not much info on these controllers anymore since computerchristmas shut down. Any ideas?


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MikeKrebs said:
is the daisy chain cable a straight through or specially made?

did you swap the first olsen?
Click to expand...

It is a straight through cable. It has been checked with a tester to be correct.

Yes I swapped the first one with the second one and also with a spare. In all cases the first one works fine until the second one is connected to it. As soon as I disconnect the second one the first one immediately starts working again.

One thing I didn't talk about in the first post is that I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a Ren-C combination to work and can't get the ZC board from Dirknerkle to work. Turns out I had the H11AA1 socket soldered in backwards. I am waiting on a new chip to arrive. I don't think I could have messed up anything on the Olsen's doing that. Besides my spare was never involved with that testing.
 
So it tried again this afternoon. I completely swapped out the first board with another one including the cat5 cables to the SSR's. I found that even though it appeared to work it actually doesn't work. So I guess I have 2 bad Olsen boards out the 3 I own. Any suggestions on how to figure out what chip(s) are bad? I have replacement chips but probably not a complete board set. I will have to look.


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I have a couple of Grinchs and I think they work the sam way.
Do any of the boards work properly by themselves in that all the outputs work correctly?
You may be able to isolate which chips are causing you grief this way.

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Only the current first controller works by itself. The other two do not work at all by themselves. I found a schematic last night finally. I want to get it printed out today and try to figure out what chip could be causing the problem. I am thinking it is a loading/shorting problem on the data lines so most likely the 595 chips not the ULN2803A since that is a darlington array of transistors.
 
I would be trying to get each one to run individually before daisy chaining them.

Maybe it is the first 595 on each board that is crook. They both got plugged into something they did not like.
Take the 2nd chip from faulty board 2 and place it in position 1 on faulty board 1 and see what happens while connected as a single board.

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I haven't been able to have the chance to run each one individually yet because the show starts right after I get home from work. But tonight I tried the 2nd chip from the 2nd in the first like you said but using it as a 2nd in the daisy chain. It didn't work so I removed one 595 chip at a time and it locked up the first board every time until I pulled the last 595 out of the board. So I am thinking either I have a complete bad set of 8 595 chips or something else is wrong. Another thing I noticed to night is the Baird I was testing doesn't even light the power in LED. I only have 4 spare 595 chips and 4 spare 2803A chips.

I guess it's possible that I blew up all 16 chips on these two boards when I was messing around trying to get the Ren-C working with my ZC board.


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Last edited:
I got half of a board working last night. I replaced the 595 and 2803 chips with the 4 spares I had. I also found a burnt trace coming off the P1 power connector. Not completely sure how I did that. Anyway once I fixed that and then removed all the chips it was fine so I put one set in the board and that channel worked so went for broke and put the the 3 sets in. A little copying of channels in the sequence to the usable ones and now at least my arches are working now. Slowly I am getting the complete show working. Now to get the rest of the chips ordered and finish the Ren 48LSD and get the pixels working for my 180 deg Mega Tree (I use the basketball goal pole).
 
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