Empower2 Instrument Control for Agilent 1290 LC

burgerr

This is in fact the case and not an isolated issue with the Infinity drivers. We found similar behavior as well for other drivers. The order in that you install the drivers is the key to failure or success. And to make it worst:

Different combinations of drivers may cause different order of installation.

So there is only one way to solve:

Trial + error

Best regards

Reinhard Burger

SamHao

There is something I noticed about the Infinity ICS 1.0 driver, and hopefully someone else has be a better solution.

We ask users to reboot the LACE and the connected instruments on weekly basis  to minize possible corruptions based on Waters and Agilent recommendations. What I found is that after a LACE is rebooted, you can verify the Waters DHCP Service and WatersService are running, the Infinity instrument has network communication to the LACE (can ping the instrument at 192.168.0.2 address). However, when user try to control the system through the Run Samples windows, the display region for the system status is blank and the instrument can not be controled. There is no error message in Windows Event log or Empower Message Center. The only "fix" I got so far is to manually restart the "WatersService", which gives the access to Infinity system immediately and everything work as expected afterwards.

My feeling is that when LACE is rebooted, the WatersService started before a related service to be started first, which caused the communication breakdown. After all the service are started, the restart of "WatersService" fixed the issue since the service it relies on are ready. The only Dependencies in WatersService now is "Remote Procedure Call".  Will adding additional depency services (such as Waters DHCP Server) help solve this issue?

Hauke

Did you power off LAN instruments on the LACE during reboot? Do you have more than one system/instrument connected to the LACE? As for my knowledge Waters recommends to boot the LACE first and afterwards power on instruments connected via LAN to the LACE. If you have more than one LAN-instrument connected the order off powering on can influence communication issues. So we have expierenced for Waters instruments. For Agilent instruments (1290/1260) it may be a try worth. There is also an additional tool available on the LACE to evaluate LAN communication with instruments: c:EmpowerInstrumentsUtilitiesNetEvaluator.exe. I hope this is somewhat helpful...

Regards
Hauke

SamHao

Hauke,

Thank you for replying to my question.

For Waters HPLC, our reboot order is to power cycle instruments first, then reboot LACE when all the HPLCs were already initiated. This is because Waters HPLC are controlled by BusLACE card, which only scans instrument configuration at the time of LACE boot. For Agilent HPLCs, they are controlled by instrument LAN card. Our boot order is to power down the intrument first, then reboot the LACE. After the LACE is rebooted, power up the Agilent instruments. For Infinity ICS 1.0 driver, we only configured one system/detector (1260DAD) for  each LACE based on release note.

Normally I manually add each Agilent HPLC by MAC/IP address (detector is configured to use stored IP address with DIP switch) in LACE property if it's controlled by Agilent ICS 1.06. For Agilent Infinity LCs, I followed the release note, which states that "In order to configure the Agilent 1260/1290 for use with the Empower DHCP Server, the DIP switches must be set to dynamic setting (all switches must be in the 0 position). When connected to Empower, the Agilent 1260 Infinity LC (with all dip switches set to off) receives an IP address from the LACE automatically through DHCP (PCS# 24399)". Although the 1260 DAD did receive IP address from Waters DHCP server, I am suspecting that it occurred after WatersService already started and it's too late. Will changing 1260/1290 systems to use stored static IP addres (DIP 7 to On) and don't use Waters DHCP service help? Anyone else used such configuration?

For the regular Agilent HPLCs controlled by Agilent ICS 1.06, we never have such problems. We seem to have constant problem with LACE reboot on Agilent Infinity ICS 1.0 driver only. I am curious whether anyone else using the same driver has similar issue. We did try to change the order of rebooting LACE/Agilent Infinity LCs and that didn't seem to help.

We are running Empower 2 FR 4 with Service Pack D. Under the folder you specified (C:EmpowerInstruments), I can't find any folder named as Utilities. Are you running higher version of Empower (FR 5 or Empower 3), or got this utility from Waters separately? My normal way of testing the communication is to ping the instrument by IP address and make sure there is no dropped packet.

Regards,

Sam

Dot

Hello Sam,

We appreciate the information you have provided along with the steps you included on how you recover from the situation.

A defect, PCS 48844, has been opened.  We plan to investigate this behavior and see how the connection can be improved and made more robust.

Best regards

Dot

Hauke

We are running Empower 2 FR5 (SP F) on a client-server system (no Citrix). The NetEvaluator was on the Empower installation (no extra utility). For Agilent HPLCs we are only using the Infinity ICS 1.00 driver. All DIP switches on the DADs are down (I think it is the '0' position).

In an earlier post you mentioned a parallel installation of LC ICS 1.06 and Infinity ICS 1.00 drivers. The latter comes with a new version of Deployment Manager (version 1.5?). A Waters Data Specialist explained to me that there may be an issue with the installation of .NET Framework versions with new Deployment Manager. So there may also be issues with the driver installed along with. We uninstalled the old driver (for us LC ICS 1.04) and then installed the Infinity ICS driver. With installation of the Infinity ICS driver first .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and the newer Deployment Manager was installed (.NET Framework 2.0 SP2 and 3.0 SP3 were already installed).

Best regards

Hauke