Oh boy, do I have a weird tale for all of you. I mostly got it working again, but there are some subtle details that points to a design flaw in the controller…
Problem #1: tower power strip with banked switches…
I have really nice power strip that has 4 banks of 4 power plugs, each bank of 4 has its own switch. So, I am able to dedicate a bank of power switches, and turn machines and equipment via a single switch. The tower I was using has a bunch of equipment plugged into it, and apparently with everything running at once, the Falcon-2 power brick was apparently not producing enough juice. I figure this out when I plugged the equipment into a different power strip that only had the Falcon-2 on it. So with a dedicated power strip, or plugging it directly into the wall, I got it mostly working, but…
Problem #2: laptop supplying power to the controller, via the USB, before the main power is turned on…
We all have come to expect USB-C PD to just work, but in this case if the controller is first connected to a USB-C PD port, it will provide just enough power that the CPU on the controller starts up, but there is not enough power to properly configure itself, and it goes into lala land – and unplugging/plugging the cable does nothing. The trick I found that mostly works is to power down the Falcon-2, disconnect the USB cable, turn the power back on, and after the controller starts up, plug the cable back in… Ok… it is working more often than not… Creality needs one of their electrical engineers try cutting the trace from the USB-C PD output on the controller, so that it only starts up with power from the power brick. If this works as expected, the cut trace could be included in the next revision of the controller board. I mean if we think about it for a moment, we are likely never going to be able to run a 40w laser cutter from a laptop’s USB-C PD, so cut the trace. It is also unreasonable to expect yjsy modern computers support USB-C but without PD…
Problem #3: loose/ill-fitting USB-C port…
As seen in the video I liked to above, the USB plug is loose and wobbly. This is likely some minor design flaw, and resulted in me seeing the LED status lights fade when I jiggled the cables. Without opening up the module, I can only guess what is happening on the board, but it is likely going to eventually break…
Overall: I consider the USB-C PD bring the controller up in a unstable state a design flaw. Likewise, having the port plugs be unsupported and wiggling is not only a design flaw but possibly a mission-critical safety issue.
Workaround: To get it to startup and work consistently I have to unplug the USB-C cable, supply power through the brick, and then attach the USB cable. Once it is one in this sequence it works roughly as expected, BUT I make sure that the brick power supply is unplugged after each use, and I will be wroking on a way to cable-tie the cables to the machine (so they cannot be yanked out by accident – and possibly breaking the plugs.
So, I hope that others from my hardware sluthing useful…