Interrogate cause of red failure light on VXI-834x

[Raytheon-Samg]

I am using a VXI-8345 MXI-3 controller and I have an error occuring in which the red system failure LED lights up.  I would like to interrogate the controller card to find the cause of this error, is there any way to do this?

[Chris_R.]

Hi Raytheon-Samg,

The Sys Fail light typically is a sign that the device need repair, but there are a few things we can try first.  If you have any other devices besides the VXI-8345 in the chassis, remove them.  Power the chassis and see if the light still remains on.  It will illiminate as soon as you power on the chassis, but should turn off shortly after.  The sysfail light will show up sometimes if there is addressing conflicts in your chassis, so removing everything but the controller will prevent this.  If this works, add each device one by one until the light stays on again.

If it doesn't work, try the controller in a different chassis to make sure the chassis works.  If that still doesn't work, try a different VXI controller in the chassis if you have one.  Any type will do to test that the chassis is working properly (MXI-3, MXI-2, GPIB, etc).

Let me know how this goes.

[Raytheon-Samg]

Thanks for the response.  We have two of the same VXI-8345 MXI-3 controller cards, and both act the same way.  The biggest problem is that this "system failure" is intermittent.  A lot of time may go by where everything is operational, then after a few hours at idle state the red light turns on again.  Removing all other cards from the chassis would be a good option to try, but it's almost a guarantee that a simple system restart will clear the failure anyways (regardless of whether or not other cards are removed).  Can other cards in the chassis drive that "system failure" status, and if so is there any way to interrogate the MXI-3 controller card to find out which card may have done this?  The only other hardware replacement issue left to try is that we do have a spare MXI-3 PCI card for our controller PC, we may try replacing that to see if any issue is resolved.  Of course it's hard to decide when the issue is resolved with such an intermittent problem.

Thanks for the help,

Sam

[Krista H]

Hi Raytheon-Samg,

There isn't any way for us to query the controller to see which device is causing an issue. You mentioned an error code in your first post. If you still have that error code and or the exact wording that was with it. This might help us pinpoint what is going on.