A snagged cable and a >>pop!<< sound, and my faithful Starlock was no more. What I've done about it since.
I'm going through the most amazing time with my equipment lately. One not-so-recent hardware failure caused by a snagged cable has made me telescope my time to acquire insights (<--- see what I did there?) about polar alignment/POLAR ALIGN in the LX850, and of guiding using a dedicated guide scope and astro guide camera.
The failure was the unrepairable damage caused to the Starlock unit. One saving grace is I did not send the unit and the main board in the mount out to the manufacturer for troubleshooting. I kept my work local and did any self-help based on knowledgeable people on reliable astronomy boards. The manufacturer suddenly shuttered and I have read some do not have their equipment back. It turns out my Starlock cannot be fixed, but the main board to my mount is safe and sound, and it works as it should.
The real grace was being forced to use easy basics to improve on the built-in handbox-based polar alignment options, and being able to learn interesting new parameters involved in non-Starlock guiding. Starlock was doing all that in a good way, but perhaps without the end user ever learning what is going on or understanding what allowances are going uncorrected as Starlock makes its adjustments.
And not to diminish the great job Starlock was doing. The end results were very acceptable in my configuration. But now unrepairable and unreplaceable, other means must be employed, and in fact those other means help enlighten the end user.
Alan
Perhaps a word about those 'other means'. For one, I discovered that my perfect polar alignment wasn't so perfect. Up until now, the Starlock was compensating for various imperfections in mount setup, and polar alignment was one. That led me to get ASIAIR Plus talking to my mount, so that I could use its advertised PA functionality.
Getting the interface working took some trial and error, but ultimately it is working via a 507 serial-to-usb cable plugged into the mount's Starlock port. (If anyone is trying to do the same and wants more info, use the Contact page.) The PA function said I was pretty far off the north celestial pole (NCP), and so I did what turned out to be fairly significant adjustments to alt and az. Then I did a drift test to enjoy the now-perfect mount, and it was not at all acceptable. So next lesson, that PA function is not so reliable, perhaps in my case because of the re-tightening of the clamping knobs. But be it as it may, I decided to polar align the old-fashioned way. I have written a separate blog on that. I now have an acceptably slow, unidirectional drift southward.
Next, I began guiding using the ASIAIR Plus, and that led to some interesting discovery about my right ascension periodic error (RA PEC). PEC is another area where the Starlock utilities lead to a less-than-perfect underlying calibration, but one which the Starlock compensates for to an acceptable end result. No more Starlock, no more compensating. I was getting less than acceptable guiding results, and in my case the PEC needed to be tightened up to take pressure off the guiding software. In an ironic twist, I managed to use the imperfect guiding to get a better PEC training than I could have done by hand. And then that better PEC was in place to do a fresh Calibration of the guider in ASIAIR Plus. That created much better guiding results. Now I can use that tighter guiding result to do a fresh PEC training, further tightening the model.
So the absence of Starlock, which effectively is an autoguider to the end user, led me to adjust my mount's polar alignment and the periodic error correction in order to get a better autoguiding routine in place. Non-Starlock users would be doing exactly that from the start, but as a Starlock user who had never autoguided with my DSLR on a 1985 LX-3 wedge, it was all fresh discovery.
I'm glad it happened even though I was so distraught when it happened.