An earlier draft said the Prolific-cable finding did not fit the timeline, since
the unit was described as working and then degrading, which a cable that never
enumerates cannot do. The timeline was what needed correcting.
From the operator: the initial setup was ONE modem and ONE cable, and it worked.
Two Micromates then had to be deployed, so a second cable was fetched to run both
at once -- and only one of the two ever worked. The other never talked over its
modem at any point, was never deployed, and a MiniMate Plus went out in its place.
That Micromate came back to the bench, and the cable on it is a Benfei (Prolific
PL2303).
So nothing degraded. The "worked at first" was the single-cable setup before the
split. One unit working and one not, configured side by side, is the signature of
a mixed cable supply rather than a unit fault.
Still worth confirming whether that cable travelled home with the unit or was
picked up at the bench; if it travelled with it there is no inference left. The
FTDI cable arriving 2026-09-26 settles it either way -- same unit, same modem, one
variable.
Records a corollary: "just deploy a Series III instead" works partly because a
MiniMate Plus has a DB-9 port directly on the unit, with no USB-to-serial adapter
in the path and therefore no chipset to get wrong. That workaround has been
routing around this exact failure mode.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ru8Lg9HkkYvX9VWWo65SmL
serversdownandClaude Opus 5
0659543a15