V-Box (vbox) Er2 - dish stopped moving

S

szilvasy

Member
My Satellite Setup
MythTV using Tevii S470, Technomate V-Box II, 99G H to H motor, 85cm dish
My Location
London
I have a motorised dish setup that I built two years ago and has been working perfectly well ever since. I have a Technomate V-Box 2 to drive the 36V motor and a few weeks ago I switched from a simple Manhattan receiver to MythTV on a PC. Consequently I have been using the motor a bit more often recently, recording various programmes on satellites ranging from 30W to 28.2E.

All this happiness ended this morning when I found my dish turned awkwardly west (beyond 30W) and the V-Box displaying "Er2". I can't get the dish to move using the buttons on top or the remote. The dish has not hit a physical limit fortunately, but I think it actually stopped at the westernmost limit that I may have programmed two years ago (but I'm not really sure, it was a long time ago).

Reading the forums here this "Er2" has something to do with "no pulse" that is - if I understand this correctly - the "communication" between the V-Box and the motor is not working. My main problem is that I'm a software guy, and while I could (miraculously) set this whole thing up two years ago, my electronics skills end at being able to verify that all connections appear to be OK - so I did just that at both the V-Box and at the motor, but everything appears to be connected.

At this point I'm a bit stuck and I'm not quite sure how I could figure out what is broken. At first I think I need to find out if the motor itself is working, but I'm not sure what would be a safe way to do that. Then I understand there's something called a "reed switch" which may be broken, but after reading about them on Wikipedia :) I'm still unsure how I can find out if it's broken and replace it (if it can be replaced anyway).

Would somebody (who wasn't as lazy at physics lessons as I was) help me out? Most things I'm familiar with use at most 12V (I mean PC components :)), so I'm a bit worried that I screw things up. Thank you in advance!
 
As the dish is now 'awkwardly' to the West, I suspect you may have driven the dish beyond a limit, following a a failure of the microswitch or the motor cannot be returned after a diode in the gearbox circuit has gone short circuit.

Looks like you are about to climb a ladder.
 
Hi szilvasy, see if you can get up to the dish. Inspect the cams and their position with reference to the limit switches as mentioned above.
 
Thank you for the responses. Since I posted I remembered that when I set up the positions for the first time I ran into the same thing.

What happens is if I accidentally drive the motor to some sort of limit, the vbox gets into this Er2 state and resetting is the only way to get out of it. (It's not enough to move a position back or turning or powering it on/off, for example.) The problem is all the stored positions are lost, of course, but the motor and vbox both seem to work fine now.

I have a Manhattan receiver that I used to set up all the positions, I will do it again (I don't think MythTV + my Tevii card is a reliable combination for this task).

I think the V-Box can be programmed to never drive the motor beyond a certain point, which should have prevented from this. However I have misplaced the V-Box's manual. Does anybody have any idea how this can be done using the remote? I'm really not sure that my attempts to set this up using my receiver at the time were successful, and I suspect that's part of why I had this problem today.

I had about 10 or 12 satellite positions set up. The vbox seems to remember positions by a number between 0-999. Now I think 0 was roughly 1W (=South). That made 28.2E something around 910 (0-1=999 etc) and 30W was somewhere around 99. (I might be mixing East and West, but I hope you get the point.) Could it be possible that if the limits were not set up correctly that the vbox would try to go from 99 to 910 not by decreasing the position (turning to East), but by increasing it (turning to West)? However if it was doing that it would have done it consistently and should have failed every time, so this is the weak point of my conjecture

I will set up the positions this time in such a way that the box won't have to do completed arithmetic (making one of the extreme satellites 0), but I'm wondering if this has any significance at all. What other (probably less insane) explanation can you offer for what happened with this vbox last night?

Thanks again.
 
Vbox will read 2000 counts shown as 0-999 then a dot on the display to indicate 1k.

Software limits as follows. Drive motor to position. press the limit button on remote control (small hole), press E or W to select the low or high limit then press enter.
 
Thank you, setting the limits worked, and now I just hope this problem won't happen again.
 
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