@langmuir-daniel or @langmuir-mike the THC firmware instructions are silent about whether the control box needs to be turned off or on during the firmware flashing process.
For the USB driver install, the control box was turned off and the driver updated to Windows without needing the control box to be powered. Similarly, the check out showed the green (box) and red (THC module) LEDs lit without the box being powered - drawing power via the USB cable from the laptop.
So do we update the firmware with the control box on or off? Can it draw enough power from the USB port on the PC or does the control box need to be turned on?
Great question! And we’ll need to make that clarification.
You are correct that the box does NOT need to be on to flash firmware. The THC board gets power from USB. Whether the power switch is turned on does not matter.
@langmuir-daniel Okay, next question, how long does it take? Which is a roundabout way to ask what happens if I kill the process? I tried doing it with the box power off. I see a green LED from where the USB plugs into the box. But it’s been running for about a half hour. The Loader popup says “Updating…” but no other status message. Taskmanager shows that it’s apparently doing something as the CPU utilization for the task is bouncing between 0.2% as a low and 0.7% at the high end.
I’m thinking a half-hour is much longer than it should take to flash the new firmware. But I don’t want to kill it and brick the module.
should take a few seconds. if you take off the cover on the control box and plug in the USB cable, there should be a green light on the MCB and a red light on the THC module. once it starts to upload the new firmware, a second red light will illuminate and start flashing next to the first one until it’s done uploading, then it will go back to 1 red light.
also, make sure you selected the THC update and the correct COM port in the uploader.
Thanks. It’s all per the instructions. Green light is on, red light is on. It’s making marginal increases in the memory utilization and still consuming some CPU. I’ve plugged in my laptop and the power box and turned that on as well.
Waiting to hear from @langmuir-daniel to find out if I’m going to brick it when I kill it or if he wants me to leave it to see if it will finish by itself.
Worked. Unfortunately I changed two things. I re-downloaded the update package and re-ran it with the power on to everything (and everything plugged in so my laptop’s USB port wasn’t potentially throttling the power draw).
This time it worked fine - less than 30 seconds. I checked out the jogging action afterward and all seems okay now. Not sure if I had a bad hex file when I unzipped the download or if my laptop was doing weird things with the power. So no help in troubleshooting things
I havent cut much, just a few simple test cuts but did not have any issues with Arc Voltage, I simply had to get a ferrite choke. Anyways I was gearing up to do some cutting today and did the firmware update per the instructions, but had the unit powered on. Everything seemed fine, THC showed it was good, all axis jogged etc. until I went to run a program now my torch won’t fire, I keep getting a Arc Voltage Lost error when trying to use the straight cut feature in FireControl. Should I have not updated?
If your torch isn’t firing its definitely unrelated to the firmware update! As a rule of thumb it is always good to run the latest firmware since we will be fixing/improving as we go.
@Hathaway13 are you hearing the relay click inside the electronics box when you fire the torch in FireControl? Try the manual fire option in FireControl to troubleshoot.
It’s working now. No idea what changed. I could hear the relay when I tried turn on the torch manually through Firecontrol, the air kicked on but never the pilot arc (using a primeweld cut 60). Pulled the torch out and unplugged the CNC port and ran the torch with no problem manually. Plugged the port back in and loaded up a program in fire control for a part and it worked. After that I was able to manually turn the torch on and off and run the straight cut from FireControl.
Showing my ignorance, although I’m working on a new computer, zip extractor, etc. Just in case someone else does what I did: don’t skip the EXTRACT part of the LS firmware update instructions!
I thought since I could see the files in the folder that they were extracted. Nope. And nothing happened until I specifically extracted the files.
