communication error pulsar 2

[ARCADIOS]

Hi,

Recently I am testing scope in windows 11 enterprise and I get communication error in pulsar 2

I also get noise in output of puslar 2 and scope crashes.....

I cleaned boards... cleaned io panels also...

Any ideas?

[valis]

Caps and the small opamp are the usual things to check & replace, we have a repair guy on here (dynamixII) as well.

The dsps themselves do fail after many years, though it's more rare. What most likely fails isn't the chips but the connections to the board, and you would need fine enough tools to check and resolder each of those legs (not a normal iron).

[ARCADIOS]

I see......
Perhaps I also made a mistake, removing a fan blowing since 2005 (19yers) on the side of the cards 2 days ago that was noisy....... perhaps this caused higher temperatures........ Perhaps I should have replaced it instantly.

[ARCADIOS]

At the moment I removed the pulsar2 6dsp card. I stay only with the scope 14dsp. Thank god I have all keys on the 14dsp card.
Too bad though because the 6 dsps of the pulsar are important for having that air and convenience needed over the 14 dsps of the scope card, especially for the polyphony of synths. + the IOs.

Troubleshooting info-----------------------------
I made some tests before removing the 6dsp card. I couldn't make it work, changed pci slots, cleaned with alcohol, cleaned the pc case inside, I always had COMMUNICATION ERROR PULSAR 2.

One mention is that in the morning with a fan blowning on the puslar card I could load scope and could max dsp with minimax polyphony + another synth.... So perhaps being cold the card was functioning for a while but it was false hope, since again I got the communiaction error after a while.

The communication error was happening after a while, sometimes with big distortion noise from the analog out of the card.

I got blue screens also.

Some other fact is that my usual reverse order (cset.ini: [board0] boardid=1 [board1] boardid=0) I can not do this anymore.I get COMMUNICATION ERROR at scope.exe load from start.
So, only a few minutes with both cards scope will load, and only with first the 14dsp card, and then always again the communication puslar error!!

[astroman]

You probably already inspected the card when cleaning contacts, so you would have noticed fallen off capacitors.
Replacement of the voltage regulator „LM1085-is-3.3“ would be a good step (it‘s a cheap part and not too difficult).
It‘s the single part soldered to the metal on the bottom right of the card. The 3.3 is important, it indicates the voltage.
You have to suck a lot of solder away from that part and the new one will need solid contact with the base plate.
(you may leave the old wires in place and just snip them off, then remove the part, shorten and bend the new contacts so they sit tight to the old ones and apply solder, but only AFTER you‘ve tightly fixed the new regulator to the base plate)

Of course it would be better to have a pro replace the part, the hint above is just a rather safe method not to mess too much with the card in case you‘re on your own.

[ARCADIOS]

do you think that windows 11 has to do with it?
I am asking because my system is old and I created a boot win11 iso bypassing the cpu check

[garyb]

no, it's not win11.

[ARCADIOS]

No it's not. Re installed 10 to check and same problem.
Not driver - software issue.

[ARCADIOS]

You probably already inspected the card when cleaning contacts, so you would have noticed fallen off capacitors.
Replacement of the voltage regulator „LM1085-is-3.3“ would be a good step (it‘s a cheap part and not too difficult).
It‘s the single part soldered to the metal on the bottom right of the card. The 3.3 is important, it indicates the voltage.
You have to suck a lot of solder away from that part and the new one will need solid contact with the base plate.
(you may leave the old wires in place and just snip them off, then remove the part, shorten and bend the new contacts so they sit tight to the old ones and apply solder, but only AFTER you‘ve tightly fixed the new regulator to the base plate)

Of course it would be better to have a pro replace the part, the hint above is just a rather safe method not to mess too much with the card in case you‘re on your own.

The Voltage Regulator Chip in my pulsar2 has other name . It is not LM1085-is-3.3 but "cs 5203A-3 can347". I am not an expert but I assume it must be the same.

About soldering myself, I don't think I would try to because I don't know the exact temperatures for this, neither I have everything needed for putting out capacitors and chips....
I can learn to do it, but first I would definitely create experience in another board, old radio or something, to create some skills removing properly the soldering etc....

The only thing that I tried to do is to warm the contacts of the 2 bigger capacitors of 16v .... and add just a tiny dose of soldering.... But neither that helped.

The card can be seen by the system.
The dsps are visible.
I can hear audio from audio out but after sometime it crashes giving the commutation error.
And As I mentioned in previous Post, it cannot be set as first board.

Also i removed the io plate in order to use it as dsps only but it cannot work this way... I thought that scope dsp booster pci cards didn't have ios and I assumed that it could be set as only dsp booster without the ios. Which doesn't work. It is not seen at all as a hardware by the system. I don't know if that is normal though.

Would it be helpful to see if it works if i put the io plate of my pro 14dsp card?? Or usually this error doesn't have to do with the io plate?

[valis]

Not an I/o plate issue. Attempt card repair and be prepared to seek a replacement if it doesn’t work.