CM11 serial port timeout

[martinb0820]

I thought I had this problem resolved, but it's back...

I have HCA 9.0 running on a dedicated Pentium 4 PC with Windows 2000 (I know this isn't a supported OS). There is absolutely nothing in (no sound card, etc.) or running on the PC except HCA and RealVNC. It doesn't have a keyboard or mouse, just a wireless network card, no anti-virus s/w, it isn't on the Internet.

When I set this up, I tested it by cycling power and it always came back up, fully functional. Lately there have been some power outages, and when it reboots, HCA sometimes complains of a serial port timeout and doesn't talk to the CM11a until I manually stop and restart HCA.

Otherwise, this setup is absolutely stable.

Is there a parameter somewhere in the registry for HCA to tell it to try to initialize communication with the CM11a longer? Is there something in Windows that can be set? Or, is this a CM11a issue? Could it be that HCA is starting up before Windows has completely initialized?

I'm transitioning to Insteon, but don't want to rewire the whole house yet...

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Martin

[KHarms]

This issue was take to technical support and here is how it went:

Tech Support
============
The issue with the CM11 is very long standing. Upon power on the CM11 doesn't always reset correctly and is mute to commands that HCA sends it.
HCA sends the command and the CM11 doesn't answer. Not much we can do about this on our side.

When you say "restart after a power failure" do you mean the computer is restarting from power off as well? There is a tiny chance that when HCA gets started that it is too early to start working with the computer I/O sub-system. That is ,the computer is still starting up, HCA gets started because it is in the windows start-up group, but when it tries to use the serial port it doesn't work well. I have seen this and there is a "fix"

in the HCA registry that tells HCA to delay for a bit after startup before trying to connect to the interfaces. But it may not be this as this is a rare condition.
You can see if this is the issue by pulling HCA out of the startup group temporarily, pulling the plug on the computer, restarting the computer, then after things settle a bit trying a HCA start and see if it connects to the CM11.

Also, If this is new behavior, the CM11 could be failing. We have a number in the test lab and some show exactly this behavior - in fact it is very hard to get them "unstuck" on power-up. Others seems to work better. Some are older

User
====
This happens when the PC restarts after the power to the house has gone out and been restored. I've observed it occasionally over the years, but problem is apparently worse with HCA running on a dedicated PC. With no other software installed, and most services turned off, HCA is started up very quickly.

If I manually restart HCA after seeing this error, everything is fine, so signs point to the CM11 not being stuck, and the serial port not being ready soon enough. I think the registry change is very likely to solve the problem.

Tech Support
============
Try this:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Software
AdvancedQuonsetTechnology
HCA
Advanced
InterfaceStartupDelay

Units are in seconds. So set it to 10 and HCA will hold 10 seconds after it starts before tries to use the interface.

User
====
I went for guaranteed success and set it to 30 sec. I pulled the plug a couple of times, and HCA started up without error. The problem wasn't happening on every startup before the registry change, so this isn't definitive, but I'd bet the issue is resolved.