How to ride out short power outages.

[Adam Fraser]

Equipment:
NEC NC2000 no UPS.
GDC SX 2000 with external IMB on 1500 VA ups.
When we get short power outages of 1-5 seconds the lamp goes out and the show continues to run until I press pause.

I don't have a problem running upstairs to press pause. What we do have a problem with is the SM losing connection during the 300 second alarm state for cooling, forcing me to do a hard shutdown every time the power flickers. This makes us go dark for 5-10 minutes every time it happens.

Is there any solution short of a multi thousand dollar ups for the projector that can help us ride out these very short flickers without forcing a hard reboot of the entire system?

[Carsten Kurz]

Should be possible to power just the projector head, not the lamp supply from the existing UPS. Not familiar with the NC2000 split wiring options, though.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I installed a gob of NC-2000's and installed 1500VA 220 volt UPS's with them. The NEC's can have a split power feed where the projector electronics feed can be split from the lamp feed... I had projector electronics and the rest of the gear in the pedestal on the UPS at 220 volts with the lamp power being fed from another 220 volt breaker in the pedestal power panel. The UPS also provides surge protection...

[Adam Fraser]

Thank you for the info, our projector is already set up for split power, but it is just ran to a separate single pole breaker in the strong projector base, so it should be as simple as running the head to the existing 120v ups and leaving the lamp on its existing double pole breaker.

I'll give it a try and see if it avoids SM disconnects during the alarm state.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Thank you for the info, our projector is already set up for split power, but it is just ran to a separate single pole breaker in the strong projector base, so it should be as simple as running the head to the existing 120v ups and leaving the lamp on its existing double pole breaker.

I'll give it a try and see if it avoids SM disconnects during the alarm state.

Pretty sure it only runs on 220 volts, split or not. But I may be wrong...

[Steve Guttag]

The Xenon projectors will run the electronics on 120V, for sure the NC1200/NC2000. Some of the new NEC lasers will only run on 220V (nominal).

[Chris Daigle]

We have a very similar setup with NEC2000's and GDC servers. We have UPS's on the Servers and on the projector electronics so we don't need to hard-boot the projectors. Frequently during bad afternoon summer thunderstorms, the power will flicker off for a second or so causing the same issue you described where the lamps go off and the shows continue to play. Adding to the confusion, the house lights never come back up as the kelmar dimmers stay in the "low" position meaning that the audience is sitting in the dark until we can run around to every effected theater to pause the show and hit the button on the dimmer to bring the lights up. Then we go back around and re-strike the lamp, back up the show by a couple minutes and re-start everything. It can easily take 10-15 minutes to get around to every theater and get it all up and running again. I've thought of running wiring from our automations (ECNA's) downstairs and have a button that we can just press if we experience a power issue that will trigger commands to pause the show and bring the lights back up. The only problem is that many times when we run upstairs after one of these events, not every single projector is off... some of them make it through these power flickers without any issues (and not always the same ones). So if we see the lights in the lobby flash during a storm and then push our "power failure" button, we would end up potentially pausing shows that didn't need to be stopped. Is there a way on an NEC projector to determine when a bulb shuts off to then trigger automation commands?

[Mike Blakesley]

[/quote]What we do have a problem with is the SM losing connection during the 300 second alarm state for cooling, forcing me to do a hard shutdown every time the power flickers. This makes us go dark for 5-10 minutes every time it happens.[/quote]
Any time we have to do a "hard restart" on the projector, I use the on/off button on the UPS to shut it off. That gets you around the cooling delay and can restart right away. This won't stop the SM from losing connection of course but at least you don't have to wait the 5 minutes for cooldown before you can restart.

[Frank Cox]

It's my understanding that taking steps to re-strike a xenon bulb that's gone out for any reason before the cooling cycle has finished is really really hard on the bulb and not a recommended practice.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Any time we have to do a "hard restart" on the projector, I use the on/off button on the UPS to shut it off. That gets you around the cooling delay and can restart right away. This won't stop the SM from losing connection of course but at least you don't have to wait the 5 minutes for cooldown before you can restart.

It's my understanding that taking steps to re-strike a xenon bulb that's gone out for any reason before the cooling cycle has finished is really really hard on the bulb and not a recommended practice.

Yep. And add the stress it places on the projector's optical system by abruptly stopping all cooling... I can see a lot of potential costly failures with that practice.

[Ian Freer]

Is there a way on an NEC projector to determine when a bulb shuts off to then trigger automation commands?

There's probably several ways to do this, but you'd need to provide a bit more info.
I haven't used eCNA's, but I understand them to be quite powerful. Can they monitor lamp status and trigger automation commands as required? Alternatively, is there a central PC type application that you could use that talks to all you eCNA's so you can at least control them all from downstairs?

If you wanted to make something quite manual (and possibly quite labour-intensive but fun to implement), you could possibly try wiring up some electronics to the GPO on the side of each NC2000 and configure a GPO for lamp status?
I haven't tried this either, although before widespread use of TMS's it did cross my mind...

DCC-GPIO.png

[Steve Guttag]

You have to be more clever than that. You also need to know what the state the lamp should be in. Or, every time you turn the lamp off, your automation will try to turn it back on. So, you need a "flag" of some sort that gets set when a cue turns the lamp on and gets cleared when you turn the lamp off. Thus, if the lamp should be on, and its off, the system will automatically restrike. But what if the lamp exploded or there is some other reason for it being off. You don't want it restriking indefinitely. So, perhaps 2-5 attempts and then declare it is a problem.

As for the eCNA, it does poll devices like projectors. And, while I think it could be made to do this, it isn't really ready for it, out of the box. For instance, coming up with a counter to only repeat the process "X" number of times. One might need to get creative to do that (probably use a "program" and a wait cue to have it step through and if the lamp comes on, exit the program...if it makes it through 5 attempts also exit the program and clear the flag. The eCNA is best at repetitive tasks that occur on each show.