OT: firewire cards are expensive

winrockpost wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:29 PM
Well dont know if it was bad card or bad cable but today my blue flame converter quit working, thought something was wrong with it, pluged in a dv camera to use for preview and couldn't get it work , started smelling somehing and it fried. So 40 dollar card, 15 dollar cable, 400.00 cam 2000.00 converter all in the garbage. Great day here in paradise. Beer now.

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:45 PM
I had an ADVC100 take down everything once while it fried.

When possible, I try to just use a 4-pin 1394 cable so that I'm not feeding bus power to things. At least it helps with the ADVC100s.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:50 PM
Did you by any chance forget to turn everything off?

Latest documentation with Sony kit clearly warns about this.
It goes further to suggest the gear may need to be physically unplugged as some devices keep the 1394 ports powered even when the PC is shutdown.

Canon have taken the same position, in general will not honour warranty claims due to damage originated from the 1394 port.

Bob.
jkrepner wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:55 PM
That sucks. Drink through it.

winrockpost wrote on 9/26/2006, 2:57 PM
What i did was took the firewire out of the converter, plugged it into a cheap canon dv camera, camera fried. Then i shut everything down, took out the card, put another one in the same slot, hooked up another cheap cam and all is well, cept i don't have a converter :)
farss wrote on 9/26/2006, 4:28 PM
We've had many firewire cables fail and the most common issue is the moulded on shell looses grip with the cable. Then the six cores get twisted together.

I'd suspect the 12V gets shorted to one of the signal lines. The protection diodes in the 1394 interface chip makes a valiant effort trying to do its job but instead ends up shorting the 12V to the 5V buss and lots of smoke gets out.

The 1394 cards are supposed to have thermal fuses on the 12 V supply to the sockets to limit the damage, I wonder if they are effective of if manufacturers are cutting corners.

Anyway, good that the damage wasn't as bad as you thought.

Bob.
MRe wrote on 9/27/2006, 12:47 AM
Sorry to hear. A few months ago I fried my TRV-33 + DataVideo DAC-100.

TRV costed $200 (175 eur) to repair and DAC-100 costed $300 to replace...

I know exactly how you feel.

There is two things I learned from this:
-- only to use 4-4 pin cables (and adapters)
-- newer use the 6-pin IEEE header in MoBo, because those are connected using a flat cable from MoBo to header in backpanel and it is only too easy to install it just one pin out-of-line and you are immediately feeding 12V to logic.

If there only were somewhere a breakbox to install between computer and camera, which would a) disconnect those two pins from 6-pin adapter and b) warn if there is something fishy going on.