BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
Oh I use the cheap crappy ones almost exclusively for many years just because of the abundance of them. Other than having to load an older version of the driver (which I saved away) I've never had an issue with them for short term testing.
So I dug out my old USB-Serial converter to play around, but its drivers are only supported up to Windows 7 😞
(My only serial device is an old Metex ME-11 multimeter, so I guess I am stuck with reading the display :D)
@Hooovahh wrote:
Cheap USB to RS-232
In the LabVIEW world it is pretty common to have to connect to external devices. And many of those devices happen to be RS-232 or serial. So a common tool for developers is a USB to RS-232 adapter. There are several different chips from Prolific, to FTDI, and a few others. This was years ago when we didn't really have visibility on this, but there are lots of counterfeit chips that are sold on the cheap. A legit device like this can be a couple of hundred dollars. But back then we were buying these in bulk. I don't remember the actual cost of these, or the number of them, but it was something like 50 of them, for $20. And they came in a large round plastic tub, like what cheese balls come in. This was the best image I could find of this size of container.
I grabbed one of these, plugged it in, and...nothing. It wasn't that there were driver issues, Windows just didn't see the device at all. So I opened one up to see what the problem was. The dsub connector inside was a solider cup type, and the PCB was shoved between the rows of pins. The PCB was a two sided board, and had solider points on the top and bottom, with a gob connecting pins to the board. It was pretty clear to me that the pins weren't making a good connection, and after spending some time fixing it, it worked fine. So my manager that ordered these sent an email complaining to the manufacture that none of them worked, and the quality of the devices was poor. I think he was looking for a refund, but instead without, asking for it, a second large tub of adapters just showed up. At this point he just let it go and figured he wasted $20 on that lesson. Occasionally when someone was idle, and looking for something to do between tasks, he'd have them repair a couple. By the way, these were all used for testing, but not put into testers for a customer.
Not worth re reading. ( is there a virtual thud factor or just tl dr?)
Lesson 1 use good quality USB Hubs.
Lesson 2: why do my good quality Hubs keep dieing? OHHH. crap! We stuck them inside the test fixture with Velcro! We kept blowing up the transient suppression with the static generated every time we yanked the Hub off the Velcro to connect a new device.
@JÞB wrote:
Not worth re reading. ( is there a virtual thud factor or just tl dr?)
TLDR: Manager bought a ton of cheap devices not fully knowing how bad they were. He complained and instead of getting a refund, they just sent a ton more. After spending time to rewire, and find older drivers, they all work fine as an engineering tools only.
It no work
I usually get some variation of something like this multiple times a year.
“Your tester isn’t behaving properly sometimes and we think it is because of a Windows update.”
“Well my tester isn’t on the internet, but more importantly it isn’t running Windows.”
“Oh can you think of any other reason it is behaving this way?”
“What did the logs say?”
“Well we haven’t looked at them yet.”
"Next time do that first"
RTFM!
I’ve also tried helping them out by walking them through things that the issue might be. A few times I just repeat the things I’ve already told them to look for or to check that have been a common problem. One email exchange was with production and had about 50 people, some upper management, where they were saying how the test system was crap and we shouldn’t have ever used it and it never has worked. I’d say “Did you try plugging in the connector?” And the only reply back was “Nevermind we fixed it”. NO YOU DIDN’T! You wasted a bunch of both of our time, made our awesome tester look bad, even though you were the problem, and just dismissed your mistake like it was nothing, while taking credit for me doing the work.
