On Sat, 16 Mar 2019, Gary Buhrmaster wrote: > On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 4:06 PM Diego Rivera <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Every so often one of the devices ceases to function and just "dies". > > It has been a long long time since I touched one of > those, but I would always look at the root causes > of the hangs first..... > > The two most common issues with the HVR-1950 > that I ran into is that it can overheat (and hang) > and the power supply can be going bad (and the > device hangs).
I didn't consider the heat aspect in his original question because he said it had been working for a while just fine and only now is starting to experience trouble. Heat won't do that - unless of course he moved the hardware into an environment which causes it to run hotter now. The power supply going bad is certainly plausible though. One thing I have learned over the years of dealing with digital hardware is (capacitor plague excepted) always to first suspect the power supply. What's more a power supply can slowly drift out of spec over time, at least the crappier ones. I had this issue with some early Silicon Dust devices. Eventually it drifts far enough to cause the device being powered to because sporadically unstable, ultimately leading to a complete failure. Frequently just replacing the power brick with a compatible substitute will do the trick (as it did with that Silicon Dust device). Digital circuits themselves can't really "drift", but analog power supplies can, and do. > > For the first, I found avoiding stacking them (which > I had been doing) was sufficient to avoid overheating > (although your location may vary and you may need > active airflow), and for the second, I replaced the > power adapter. FWIW, I don't think any of the > power adapters that I ever got from Hauppauge > were of good quality, and I usually just replaced them > pro-actively with a high quality switching supply > (at the time I had a local source of delta branded > oem switching supplies that were dirt cheap and > new in box). Note that you typically can't just use > a VOM on the adapter to test, you have to put the > adapter under load and look at the ripple. Usually > just easier to replace the power supply. I've never heard of any anecdotes of the HVR-1950 devices getting into heat trouble when stacked, but definitely that was the case with the earlier generation PVR-USB2 devices. And yes, if it is voltage drift you have to measure that voltage when it is powering the device not open-circuit. Switching power supplies (which is everything I have ever seen from Hauppauge) can be affected by severe load conditions, and "no load at all" is actually such a severe state... > > And none of this was actually in response to > the question you asked... Well maybe not for disentangling the driver when the hardware fails but obviously if he can stop the failures from happening at all that's a pretty good outcome. -Mike -- Mike Isely isely @ isely (dot) net PGP: 03 54 43 4D 75 E5 CC 92 71 16 01 E2 B5 F5 C1 E8 _______________________________________________ pvrusb2 mailing list [email protected] http://www.isely.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pvrusb2
