DP2K-15C:"player - board insertion tamper" then "ICMP status: failed"

[Marlon Martins]

Hi, today one projector, a DP2K-15C gave a "player - board insertion tamper, cannot play" on the status but no board has been touched. Removing, cleaning the contacts, resitting the boards, the error changed to "ICMP status: failed". Turning the light on and projecting the test patterns, the image was all greenish and full of noise. turned everything off again, cleaned the contacts again, put everything back together and the error was gone, projector is working fine.

anyone had this king of error? its really just bad contacts or perhaps something worst is under the hood? today was a very humid day, raining with super cold temperature. don't know if this affected somehow.

thanks in advance!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Looks you'd some major luck this time, but Barco's backplane is a bit notorious for bad contacts. The climate you operate the machine in, does seem to affect the failure rate at least to some extend.

[Carsten Kurz]

I suggest you download the service/maintenance manual and give all board contacts a good cleaning on a regular schedule. I had a similar issue at a colleagues site a few months ago. We could not get rid of a sequence of similar errors until we took all the boards out, cleaned the contacts, and carefully reseated them. Since then, no issues.

[Marlon Martins]

thanks. will tell the them to schedule a thorough cleaning for this projector.

[Leo Enticknap]

Suggest cleaning the board contacts with DeOxit D5, then sealing them with G100.

Per Barco's Info-T 1383 (can't attach it here, as it exceeds the maximum allowable file size - sorry), ICMP contacts should be cleaned every year, as part of planned maintenance "C".

[Marco Giustini]

It still puzzles me as my desktop computer never needed its RAM or RAID card or Video card to be re-seated over 12 years of heavy use but Barco boards need yearly re-seating...

Leo,
Do Barco recommend a contact cleaner for that purpose?

[Leo Enticknap]

I would guess the reason to be heat cycling. Related to which, the only occasions on which I have had to reseat RAM boards in order to make BSODs go away have been in laptops with clogged up fans; likely the same reason. Especially in xenon-lit projectors, there will be a significant difference from cold to hot and then back again. Added to which, as Marcel notes, Barco backplanes (the Series 2 ones at any rate) are notorious for poor contacts.

AFAIK, Barco does not recommend a specific brand. It was Mark Gulbrandsen, years ago on this board, who first recommended DeOxit, and he won a convert in me. It's made literally dozens of situations like the one described by Marlon simply go away and stay away for me, especially in high end residence projectors on the Malibu coast, which get whacked with very high humidity. That's not to say that another brand of contact cleaner wouldn't do the same thing: I've just found that DeOxit works extremely well, and am sticking with it.

[Marco Giustini]

Laptops also are subjected to all sort of vibrations, it makes sense.
TBH the card cage of a Barco is very well ventilated. If the booth is air conditioned, really the connectors shouldn't be subject to such severe heat cycles.

It seems that everybody likes DeOxit - too bad it's not available in the UK!

[Leo Enticknap]

The Barco Series 2 card cage is very well ventilated if the air filter in front of it is cleaned regularly, and the booth is maintained at a sensible temperature. Most of the projectors I've had weird ass error messages in that have been cured by the pull cards - DeOxit - reseat cards ritual have either had gross and disgusting air filters that haven't been cleaned in years (including one that was so thick with popcorn oil grease that I literally had to insert a flathead screwdriver behind the pull tab and use it as a makeshift pry bar to get the thing out - that filter had effectively become fly paper), or have been in booths that get very hot and/or cold, or both.

[Marco Giustini]

I never considered that - it's been a while since I was fiddling with those so I can't remember whether all the backplane faults were on similar situations but happy to trust you

[Marcel Birgelen]

The Barco Series 2 card cage is very well ventilated if the air filter in front of it is cleaned regularly, and the booth is maintained at a sensible temperature. Most of the projectors I've had weird ass error messages in that have been cured by the pull cards - DeOxit - reseat cards ritual have either had gross and disgusting air filters that haven't been cleaned in years (including one that was so thick with popcorn oil grease that I literally had to insert a flathead screwdriver behind the pull tab and use it as a makeshift pry bar to get the thing out - that filter had effectively become fly paper), or have been in booths that get very hot and/or cold, or both.

We have airconditioning and air-filtering in the booth of our screening room and I've never really had any problems with the backplane of our Barco projector in there. Equipment we've installed there years ago still looks like new when we open it. I've only needed to clean the filter of the projector once over the last 4 years and still, there was very little dust in there. Meanwhile, the most issues I've ever seen are in a location where the projectors are set-up in an open-booth in the lobby, where popcorn oil and dust can roam free and temperatures constantly go up-and-down. Those kinds of environments are killing for your expensive equipment.

In the days off digital cinema, you should consider your booth to be more like a datacenter than anything else. Humans only go there if the machines need them, otherwise it's a space where machines operate and their requirements are different than those of humans. They don't particularly like our filth.

[Carsten Kurz]

Barco recommends pure Alcohol for the yearly ICMP contact cleaning procedure. That will probably not be enough if the machine is operated under adverse conditions.

[Steve Guttag]

The alcohol is for the tech...DeOxit for the machine.

[Leo Enticknap]

Giggle.

In the days off digital cinema, you should consider your booth to be more like a datacenter than anything else.

In an ideal world, yes, but there are some booths that were built before the days of digital cinema that are practically impossible to maintain to datacenter levels of cleanliness. And there are many indie places that only have a tech in for planned maintenance once or twice a year, with the air filters going untouched in the intervening period, no matter how much I explain to the owner that they should be cleaned monthly, and that cleaning is easy; even just pulling them out and running a vacuum cleaner over them is better than nothing.

There are one or two post houses with DP4K-Ps I service, that I could eat my lunch off the air filters after they haven't been touched for six months, so well filtered is the HVAC system. But in my experience at least, those are the exceptions that prove the general rule. This is, IMHO, that the more hostile an environment a Series 2 Barco is operated in, and the less frequently its card cage air filter is cleaned, the more likely you are to experience a backplane contact problem that requires the DeOxit ritual to fix if you're lucky, and a new backplane if you're unlucky.

[Marcel Birgelen]

In an ideal world, yes, but there are some booths that were built before the days of digital cinema that are practically impossible to maintain to datacenter levels of cleanliness. And there are many indie places that only have a tech in for planned maintenance once or twice a year, with the air filters going untouched in the intervening period, no matter how much I explain to the owner that they should be cleaned monthly, and that cleaning is easy; even just pulling them out and running a vacuum cleaner over them is better than nothing.

It's interesting how that quote got attributed to Carsten.

I see somewhat of a discrepancy here too . Many booths I know of that where built in the days of digital cinema aren't even real booths as some of them are just a raised plateau in the foyer and others are more like hush-boxes inside the auditorium. There isn't much glory to begotten with those, especially not for those of the first kind. Maybe they already factored in the early write-offf of their equipment into the design of the place...

Most of the old booths I know of, at least still are a real room, they also have a door that usually is kept shut, while that sounds somewhat trivial, it seemingly isn't any more... It usually doesn't cost all that much to install a bunch of filters on your ventilation or HVAC system. Also, installing one or two beefy airconditioning units if your HVAC system doesn't provide for it already, shouldn't break the bank, especially compared to what a big-ticket item in your average projector will set you back. You also don't need to cool down the room to a freezing point, a constant temperature is more important. If you regularly show movies, heating it should not even be required. And, if you keep your booth exclusively for the business of showing movies, the sources for dust and dirt are mostly limited to thre humans that visit the room.