second 595 board flashing - ISSUE FOUND

[cobraman44]

My second 595 board is in series with the first on a single parallel port. The first board works fine. The second board will correctly turn on a channel it is suppose to but other channels will stay lite very dim. I have tested this setup before and it all worked great. Any suggestions on what would cause this. I have tried diifferent lengths of cables between the 2 controllers. Nothing has changed. Same power supplies and setup. The only change has been using vixen 2.0 but not sure if that could cause it.

[wjohn]

have you swapped the order of the boards, just to make sure the second board is working ok?

PC > A > B

PC > B > A

PC > A

PC > B

[Ronp]

Check your ground from the PC. I have had this happen to me. :?

[Mudsculpter]

I set my board on my Power supply once while it was powered and shorted and burned out a trace. I wasn't thinking. Just happy to have it built and working. Luckily I was able to repair the damage and get it working again. Maybe something similar happened.

[cobraman44]

I had swapped the boards and the problem occurs on which ever one is the second board. I checked for potential ground difference between both boards and the PC. 10mV all the way through. Thanks for the suggestions. Any other ideas?
I guess I should mention that the light are not lite at all if music is not playing. It only happens when the song is playing.

[Macrosill]

Is this a coop board? If so are the jumpers installed properly? How are you bringing power to the board? What are you using for a power supply? Are you using a pre-made Cat 5 cable between the boards? If not what is the pinout you are using to make the cables? Did you setup the Olsen 595 plugin properly in Vixen, including the proper channel count?

[NogginBoink]

In addition to just checking groud difference, establish you have continuity on the ground pin from the parallel port all the way to the second board. A 10mV difference suggests to me that the two grounds are floating relative to each other. If they were connected, you would get a reading of zero point zero.

[cobraman44]

Found the issue. The only other thing that was changed was the motherboard. I needed a motherboard that had an ISA slot for a second parallel port. I never tested multiple boards with this motherboard. Well that is the issue. I tried the olsens on LPT2 and they work great. I put the LEDTRIKS on LPT1 and it works good enough. I just get a little flicker about every second or two. I tried every setting I could find in the bios but it did not change the issue. Never occurred to me that the motherboard would cause the issue. Any problems I have had with the parallel port was erratic behavior or not working at all. LPT1 works for both boards but board twos inactive leds are dimly lite.
Thanks all for the help in troubleshooting this issue.

[Macrosill]

The new motherboard does not sound like it was the issue. There is something else there causing the problem.

If you are happy with the new MOBO so be it.

[cobraman44]

It has to be with the parallel port. How else would the issue go away with a different parallel port. I am not saying the Mother board is bad but something is being outputed that affected the second olsen board. (noise, signal level, etc) I could always connect an ocilliscope and see the differences but that would not solve the issue just identify it. Maybe after Christmas I will troubleshoot further.

[Mudsculpter]

Does that parallel card have a driver? maybe it needs to be updated
plus check the settings of all the ports in "System Properties"

I'm running out of ideas

[cobraman44]

Both parallel ports are using the same driver. The default microsoft port driver. The one that has the issue is the onboard parallel port. The ISA card parallel port works fine.