ACA500 Plus - Aux Card problem

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.
  • Hi Jens!


    I bought from you in 21-10-2019 ( order number 64886 ) one ACA500 Plus.


    It has very little use and I'm playing more now with it because this week I started my summer vacations.


    Today the Aux Card started to behave weirdly and 90% of the time did not work.


    Examples of this weird behaviors:


    -> with the WB 3.1 already booted, when I plug in the Aux Card two things can happen:

    1) the white aux card led does not light up and the CFAUX icon does not appear on the workbench desktop;

    2) the white aux card led does light up and the Amiga power led starts to blink and nothing happens to;


    -> booting into WB 3.1 with only the Boot card inserted, it boots in 9 seconds. Booting into WB 3.1 with both cards inserted the boot time jumps to 43 seconds!


    -> when booting into WB 3.1 with both cards inserted, the Aux Card is 90% of the times not detected!


    This is not normal and it did not behave like this before.


    Some details of my system:


    - the ACA500 ROM is almost since day 1 on the last version 0.135 ( was shipped to me with 0.129 if I'm not wrong )

    - the slot of the Aux card has all the pins straight ... nothing is damaged there

    - yes the CF Aux Card is enabled in my profiles :)

    - tests done with the CPU @ 14Mhz

    - I use 2 brand new Sandisk Ultra 16GB CF Cards

    - I switched the CF cards and the same occurs ( installed WB 3.1 on the CF card that was the Aux card, and the one that was the Boot card was formated in FAT32 to be now the Aux card )

    - I'm using one Amiga 500, revision 5, with upgraded ECS Denise and ECS Agnus 8372A


    Please tell me what to do?

    RMA to you or do you know some more tests to do?




    Thanks Jorge.

  • 2) the white aux card led does light up and the Amiga power led starts to blink and nothing happens to;

    That's a signal from the automatic mounter that tells you "something is wrong", and it's attempting to power-cycle the card to try again. This also explains the prolonged time that the computer takes to boot if the AUX card is inserted.


    While your test with swapping the two cards is perfect, it does not tell us of the Sandisk cards are real or not. Sandisk is a top brand that unfortunately pulls in lots of counterfeit products. I'd suggest to try a no-name card as well, something that comes from your local shop, not from ebay, which is full of fake cards.

  • OK .... news ... tested with the other A500 PSU that I have around and no problem.

    It seems to work ok.

    Aux card recognized on boot and when inserted after booting into WB 3.1.


    Tested again with the 1st PSU and no problem too!


    In my mind the PSU factor could be the cause because they are old and no recap was made until today, but now I'm lost with this test with the 1st PSU.


    Can the problem occur only when the PSU is hotter? Because this test was made with both PSU cold.

    A hotter PSU will decrease its efficiency?


    Also the Amiga is cold.


    I'm going to let them ON and let some heat to build up on both the PSU and the Amiga and if it fails again I'll switch PSU's.


    Yesterday when I had the problems both the PSU and the Amiga were running for some time and were hot.


    I'll let you know for what happens ....

  • A hotter PSU will decrease its efficiency?

    A hotter PSU will change the available capacitance on the big electrolytic caps. Depending on their inner construction, it can go up or down, and this heavily depends on the frequency that the switchmode PSU is using, so I would not dare any prediction other than "behaviour is different at different temperatures".

  • A hotter PSU will change the available capacitance on the big electrolytic caps. Depending on their inner construction, it can go up or down, and this heavily depends on the frequency that the switchmode PSU is using, so I would not dare any prediction other than "behaviour is different at different temperatures".

    And you are right .... after my 1st PSU got hotter, in every reboot the Aux Card problem returned!!


    Immediately switched to the 2nd "cold" PSU and no more problem .... back to 1st PSU still hot and again .... guess? no Aux Card !!!


    I'm going to recap the 1st PSU.


    The 2nd PSU is newer and for now will stay untouched.


    Thank you both Tobias/Jens!

  • Hi Jens.


    Just noticed that my oldest PSU is rated with 2.5 amps on the 5v line.


    Is it enough to drive the ACA500 Plus?


    I ask this because my newer A500 PSU is rated 4.5 amps on the 5v line.


    Both have 1 amp @ 12v and 0.1 amp @ -12v


    Cheers,

    Jorge

  • Just noticed that my oldest PSU is rated with 2.5 amps on the 5v line.


    Is it enough to drive the ACA500 Plus?

    That may be a little on the low-side, yes. Further, the 2.5A model has the worst efficiency, so it gets hotter than the switchmode-PSUs. This will result in worse ageing of the output caps and ultimately result in failures like the one you're describing here.


    These PSUs are quite old - you might want to re-cap them (or replace with something new, just make sure they have proper regulation and don't do weird "overvoltage protection" advertising, hiding that they use unsuitable MeanWell-Chassis).

  • Update:

    PSU re-caped and after a long time being ON (with a good heat build in it) the problem never occurred again!!


    Soft and hard restart shows no problem with the Aux card.


    My ACA500 Plus is running fine now!


    Thank you Jens.

  • The last reply was more than 365 days ago, this thread is most likely obsolete. It is recommended to create a new thread instead.