Spooky Fine Offset

[Sol]

My first post so, Hello To All and Seasons Greetings.
Have to share this one with the forum group.
A few weeks ago while sitting on the PC reading the forum comments a very strange almost spooky thing happened. My fine offset station that sits on the pc next to me suddenly lit up and started beeping and flashing. I just about had a cardiac it was totally out of the blue and unexpected. After calming down my immediate reaction was that the station must have recorded some high or low event and this triggered an alarm.
The station had been running for quite a few months with out anything like this happening and I know that I hadn’t set any alarms so I fired up Easy Weather and checked all the settings. All as expected no alarms set and no new alarmed records showing. By this time the unit had gone quiet so thinking it was a one off I went back to the PC.
WRONG!
About 20min later the beast starts flashing and beeping at me again, this time I check the USB connections and the batteries, all of which appeared to be normal. Again the station went quiet so I shut down the PC and went for dinner. This strange behavior carried on randomly for a couple of days even when then the PC was off.
A few days later I was able to get another chance to have a play so I went through routine of checking everything again and still nothing found. Cumulus showed no sign of any data loss and the graphs looked totally normal, no strange readings at all.
All very curious, what next an exorcist?
In frustration (and don’t ask me why) I pulled out the USB cable and swapped it end for end (same port)….. The dam unit hasn’t missed a beat since?
I checked the cable on at least two previous occasions, with nothing unusual found!
So if any of you Fine Offset owners come across this strange occurrence give it ago and swap the cable.

See Ya
Sol

[mcrossley]

Welcome to the forum Sol - I hope you have banished your poltergeist!

[robynfali]

Not had the problem at all with mine, and its stuck on 24/7

welcome to the forum btw

[ben-s]

My station did this a few months after I got it. It turned out that the LCD's touch overlay had gone faulty.
As I a) didn't want to take the whole thing down and return it, and b) because I'm running it straight into cumulus, and never use the screen, I just disconnected the touch overlay.
It's just a case of opening the case up and unplugging the touch panel from the main PCB.

In your case, the action of swapping the USB cable around will probably have strained the alignment of the case and screen just enough to stop the problem. I found that I could stop it by squeezing certain places around the screen's bezel at first. After a while, this trick stopped working, so you may well find the problem comes back at some point.
I know this has happened to other users too, and rather than just disconnecting the screen like I did, one or two of them have removed the touch panel entirely, which dramatically improves the screen's readability. If you do this, you need to add some packing to the edge of the screen to hold it in place.
https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=5402#p5402


You're right about it being a shock when it starts beeping though - mine first went off at about 2 AM. I'd just gone to bed and was just drifting off when it started! It's surprisingly loud at that time of night...