Shooting Chrony Gibberish

[SpindleB]

I acquired a couple Shooting Chrony, an Alpha and a Beta (no master). When I connect to my computer using multiple different USB to Serial ports all I get in Putty is gibberish. My settings are 4800,8,n,1. I have full 5V RS232 ports on a couple of the USB devices, the 3.3V returns nothing. One of my USB has the breakout LEDS and the RX led is constantly lit. I've run the gamut of port speeds up to 57.6k and nothing seems to work. Port settings in Putty and my PC match.

Anyone happen to have any idea what I've got wrong?

[anti-squirrel]

I had a very similar experience with my Chrony Alpha.  After tinkering/disassembling, I found a darkened area on the PCB around one resistor.  Rather than spend any more time with it (bought on eBay a few years back for a song), I decided it deserved to be relegated to the e-waste pile.  It never liked being used in bright sunlight, it did not tolerate higher humidity, it was finicky with power supplies, and after buying a Caldwell, I realized I did not have to put up with such a finicky obstreperous piece of technology.  I realize this is no real help for your situation, but honestly, the Caldwell is a better unit all around and connects via both USB and bluetooth.

[SpindleB]

At this point any other chronograph would be infinitely more expensive than what I was given for free.
I have a couple of cheap chinese chronos that actually work quite well but the only method of data transfer is a screen shot from my phone.
I was hoping that the Shooting Chrony would at least connect and then I could probably hack together a perl script or some code to read the data.
I'm not seeing anything coherent from either chrony.
But it is exactly the same gibberish from both of them and they both work just fine as chronographs.
I'll try hooking one to a Raspberry Pi to see if it is Win10 as the source.

[anti-squirrel]

I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 10 was the source of your headaches.  And free is free- if both Alphas are putting out the same data stream, I'm thinking the OS is the problem.

I've been lucky thus far with Win 7, 8.1, and 10... Windows 11 is... laughably bad.  My purview is SQL, not real programming languages, so if you can finagle PERL into working, all the better. 

I've been eyeballing going back to Mint (among several other flavors of Linux) given Windows 11's incessant desire to break almost everything it touches.  I'm well entrenched in Windows thanks to my 9-5, but as I creep closer to retirement- and smart folks figuring out how to get modded Fallout 4 running on Linux without too many hoops to jump- I'm savoring going back to a good OS.

[mobilehomer]

Here's a place to start -
https://www.longrangehunting.com/threads/how-to-connect-a-chrony-to-laptop-pc.116477/