What is your experience with 5600, 5610 failure occurances?

[uiop]

Just checking the community:

We employ about 40 each of these (up and down converters) in our facility, and have been experiencing regular failures. The typical failure mode is attenuated input readings or attenuated output power.  The age of the converters ranges between new and 7 years old. .  We have about 6 of these repaired per year. The repair cost per unit is close to $2K US

We suspected temperature as a root cause of failure for a while, but after shoring up our deficiencies (obeying NI's whitepaper on PXI rack deployment best practices) over the past two years, the failures persist at a similar rate.

Does anyone else experience such regular 5600 or 5610 failures?

[James_Battleaxe]

Hi uiop,

I have not heard of this type of consistent failures with the PXI 5600 or the 5610. I recommend opening an SR with the RMA department so we can take a closer look at this issue and make sure it's not a design problem with those devices.

[uiop]

Hi James, thanks for the intel.

Yup, we've had several NI engineers here to help with our situation.  We are talking on the nature of 90-100 service requests (and RMA/ repairs) over the course of 7-8 years.  Those also include quite a few 5142 digitizers, and to a much lesser degree 4110 power supplies, 6259 DAQs, etc.

In the end, we have been counseled to avoid running ports unloaded (on the RFSGs) switching outputs energized, and to observe the NI best practices for PXI rack deployment whitepaper (fans on high, filters clean, adequate clearance, slot blockers, and auxiliary cooling).  We are also running VIs within most of our test systems/apps to monitor rack temperature.

[James_Battleaxe]

Hi,

Thanks for the update. I hope these tweaks will reduce the repairs needed on your devices in the future!

[uiop]

Thanks, time will tell!