NI 1433 frame grabber not recognized by hardware

[mvdeplas]

Hello everyone,

I am seeing a very strange problem with our NI 1433 frame grabbers. Some background: I work in machine vision, and we sell evaluation systems for image sensors. An evaluation system consists of a PC, a frame grabber, and a software installation containing VAS2012, a vision development runtime and a LABView runtime to run our own LABView executable.

Recently, a customer complained that the frame grabber in his system was not listed in NI MAX, nor could he see it in the Device Manager. When opening the PC, he also saw that the LED on the top side was off when the PC was powered on. Reseating the frame grabber in its socket did not help.

He reported this to me, and I concluded it must be a hardware defect. He shipped the system back to us, I was able to reproduce the problem and replace the frame grabber with a new one, reinstalled all software, and activated it with the licence files already on the PC. This seemingly solved the problem, as the frame grabber was now corectly recognized and I could grab frames without any issues.

However, when the repaired system arrived back at their office today, he experienced the SAME issue: the frame grabber was not listed in NI MAX, nor in Device Manager, and the LED was off again.

MY QUESTION:

Could this be a licencing issue? Does NI track the serial number of the hardware with the activation code of the VAS software, and shuts down something when it detects new hardware used with the same activation code?

Has anyone experienced something similar?