Re: VFDs, Noise, and RS-485

Terry Given wrote:


hear hear. I've had some hilarious hardware/software arguments too - me and the s/w guy basically saying "its your fault". Usually its s/w, perhaps 75% of the time - I suspect because its so easy to be careless with s/w, and so hard to spot (not looking is also the most common technique used for s/w peer reviews and testing).


Cheers
Terry

I have been in some 'interesting' sw/hw fights myself! I was working tool roads a few years back, and they had an interesting 'hardware' problem. Every weekend, around 2-3 in the morning, the system went crazy. It started a network cascade and every toll system on the road went down. It was 'obviously' a hardware fault, so they called in some network experts to solve the problem. They put a network sniffer on the system, and watched the traffic...

Sure enough, early sunday morning, there was nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a huge cascade! What was the cascade? I bunch of 'Where are you?' messages! They programmers had built in a "If I don't hear from a system for 'x' minutes, check to see if they are still there..." routine. They had NOT built in the stuff to QUIT asking once it got an answer...

Charlie
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