[Dsg-halld_plc] Hall D PXI chassis troubleshooting progress

[Tyler Lemon]

Hello, 

This afternoon, Pablo, Brian, and I attempted to debug the PXIe-1078 chassis that was removed from use from Hall D this morning. 

We were able to get the chassis by itself to power on with limited issues. The only issue we could find is that one of its two fans sounds like it is going bad when it runs at lower speeds. 

We then tried powering the chassis with the old PXIe-8101 controller that was in the spares cabinet in Hall D's counting house. The chassis seemed to power on fine with its fans turning on as expected and the power button's LED turning green. The screen we connected to the controller also showed the controller had started its boot process, but since the controller was not connected to network and there were no other modules installed in the chassis, it did not successfully finish booting. 

Next, we tried to power the chassis with the new PXIe-8840 controller that Brian recently bought as a spare. With the 8840 controller installed, the chassis' fans did not turn on and the power button's LED stayed off. There were also no LED indicators on the front panel of the 8840 controller. We could see that there were a series of green LEDs blinking rapidly inside the controller, but we could not find in the manual what these LEDs mean. 

We called National Instruments' help line and the only advice they had was to try the 8840 controller in a different chassis. We are not able to try the controller with a different chassis because the only other PXIe-1078 chassis is installed in Hall D and is in use. To verify whether the new 8840 controller works, we will have to wait until after the spring run is over and we can use the chassis installed in Hall D. 

We will continue debugging to determine the cause of the chassis' failure and to verify the new 8840 controller works properly. 

Best regards, 
Tyler 
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