I have an R45/R410 PRO REV.B relay board that is controlling turnstiles at my workplace. This is connected via a serial port on an old Windows 10 HP desktop that is showing signs of age. We recently bought a new HP Desktop to replace it, and it is running Windows 11.
When we tried connecting the relay board to the new tower, it was not detected. One of my colleagues read that we could try troubleshooting it with the NCD Base Station software, which we did, but even that tool did not detect the relay board on the COM port.
Assuming that the serial port might have issues, we tried a USB to Serial converter and that too did not work. The Base Station software could not find the relay board on the newly assigned COM Port.
Switching the connection back to the old tower, everything works just fine.
If anyone has suggestions, I would appreciate the help.
You might check the serial port settings/properties for the port through the Device Manager on the new machine and compare it to the same settings on the old machine.
According to the picture your baud rate should be 9600.
You could try hooking that COM port up to something like Putty and write something to it. If you get the same message back then it would point to TX being tied to the RX of the serial port somewhere which would cause a Comms issue.
Usually it will be a settings issue as well, but you can also look at the Serial voltage used. These boards support 12 and 5 V serial using the PC (12V) and MAC (5V) jumper on the board.
So after testing last night, what worked was moving the PC/MAC jumper on the relay board to the MAC position, and connecting the new desktop tower via the serial port. I also tested this on the old PC and it still worked. Strangely though, the USB to serial adapter did not work, but I think this has more to do with drivers for that particular cable.
Although the default jumper position for PC RS232 applications is the PC setting, the manual specifies that the relay board won’t be damaged if it is set to MAC:
Input data voltage select, PC +/- 12V RS232, MAC +/5V RS232 specification. Use MAC mode for Mac systems, PC laptops, USB to Serial Adapters, and TTL data sources. It is okay to try both settings if you are unsure for your application. No damage will result due to improper setting of this jumper.
