Foss Infratec 1241, Service Manual

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Infratec™ 1241 Grain Analyzer
Service Manual 1001 5015 / Rev. 4 4:1
4 Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
4.1 General
As a Service technician you should try to gather as much information as possible be-
fore proceeding with a course of action when a customer calls to you with an instru-
ment problem. The majority of problems that the customer experiences can be
divided into two main categories, "poor" results or instrument faults. Instrument
faults express themselves in error codes or that the instrument does not work at all.
Further, a problem reported may be a repeatable problem or an intermittent problem.
The later requires more information to be pinpointed. You should then ask the user
questions like;
• When in time did the problem occur first?
• How frequent is it?
• Did it occur in conjunction with any other event, e.g. relocating the instrument,
adding new hardware, adding new software etc?
• Has it escalated?
• Does the problem happen when certain events (keystrokes, selecting things etc)
happen?
• Try to think "outside the box" when you ask questions. Consider the
environment, e.g. vibrations, temperature, straylight, electricity, user log-in, time
in the day/week or anything else relevant that may cross your mind.
• Has the user himself observed anything that is out of the ordinary?
Consider the first contact with the customer as a golden opportunity to get more in-
formation by asking questions like the ones above. A telephone call is a duplex com-
munication and many times you will get closer to the root cause even if you may not
be able to pinpoint the exact cause of the problem.
A very good way of getting closer to a solution is to learn how a working system be-
haves. Learn how "normal" logfiles and scans look like. Look at a normal startup and
learn the procedure for the hardware like LED´s, beeps, hardware movements, soft-
ware messages etc. A deviation in this kind of information may also give clues to a
solution.
Discussing "poor results" may be the most difficult situation due to the fact that the
customer´s expectations can sometimes exceed the typical specified performance of
the instrument. For NIR instruments, which always is an in-direct method of meas-
urement, you must consider the robustnes of the application, the sample itself and
perhaps environmental influence. This without saying that the problem might be re-
lated to hardware or software in the system.
If you wan't to escalate a support incident to the 2nd line support please always add
all the information you have gained during your first attempts to troubleshoot. Also
describe the action you may have taken and the effect of those actions, if any. For the
Infratec 1241 ALWAYS supply the complete set of log files from the instrument.
This chapter helps you to quickly find the explanation and likely cause to most of the
error messages and faults. The beginning of the chapter includes questions that help
you to sort out what kind of problem that has occurred.