GC no longer able to communicate with Chemstation

[sophiebee]

I have an Agilent 7890B GC. Until recently, it was working fine, and then it suddenly stopped communicating with the software and I get an "Attempt to load configuration failed" message when I try to open Chemstation.

I have isolated that the problem is the GC itself: The IP configuration is correct, I can ping the GC from the computer, the computer can control other GCs, and the problem GC cannot communicate with any other computer's software.

My guess is a hardware problem with one of the logic boards, possibly a loose cable, but I'm not sure which. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

[wss]

If you can ping the GC and it's coming back, then it's might not be a hardware issue. I have had similar problems when using certain Ethernet switches, so you might want to check if the problem is still present when using a different switch.

However, a lot of software comms issues (as opposed to hardware comms issues) can be caused by outdated firmware - sometimes I've fixed problems very similar to the ones you've described by flashing the most recent firmware onto the GC or MS, so there's another thing you might want to try.

https://www.agilent.com/en/support/gas- ... are-update

[antonk]

What I know about 7890:

It is WWW-RPC server - i.e. it responds with XML documents in reply to XML queries over HTTP protocol.

Please note - you got "Cannot read configuration" - i.e. instrument connected but Chemstation or whatever does not like what it gets.

Instrument configuration (it is XML document returned by GC) consists of two parts: Fixed and Variable.
Fixed part - what is read from hardware.
Variable part - what is configured for you life realty (columns, gases, channels)

One of them is broken (most probably the Variable part) - the GC driver inside Chemstation (for some reason called "Rapid" - i'd rather call it with something opposite, as it written with .NET)
fails to initialize.

Instrument may loss the variable part of configuration due to bad battery or power problem.

So the one advice - crawl through the config menu and manually check all the settings, reset them. Reboot the instrument.