Aftermarket/unofficial Barco S2 light engine fan

[Leo Enticknap]

Had a fan go bad last week, and was told that Cinionic are out of stock (projector is long out of warranty). I didn't want to leave the risk of the lamp suddenly shutting off (due to an overheat) for a significant time, so I Googled the OEM model that Cinionic repackages (Delta Electronics FFB1224SHE). But the only other vendor I could find that is selling them in the US has a minimum order of 36. So I found and bought this on Amazon. The form factor (120mm square and 38mm deep) and power consumption (24V, 0.8A) are identical, and its airflow almost is (170 CFM for the official fan, 174 for this one). The main differences are that this one is four wire (PWM), and the official fan is three wire. I could not find a three-wire fan that met all the other specs. The connectors are also different.

So, discarding the PWM wire, I spliced the backplane connector onto the Amazon fan...

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...and installed it.

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It works beautifully, but for one gotcha: the fan control board cannot read its speed. Its cooling performance is actually a bit better than that of its predecessor, which, per the logs, was holding the light engine compartment in the mid 30s of Celsius with the lamp on and warmed up. This one is managing the high 20s:

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But the fan control board can't read its speed, meaning that the yellow tail light won't go away:

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Does anyone have any ideas about this? I'm guessing that it's something to do with the PWM functionality in the fan, but I know from building PCs that a PWM fan is usable in a three pin header, and the BIOS can still read the fan's speed: it just can't change it (that requires the PWM function). But this projector won't read the speed, either.

This is an annoyance rather than a massive problem. For one thing, this fan makes a high pitched whine that the official one doesn't, meaning that it is possible to tell if the fan is actually working or not simply by standing next to the projector and listening. But if there is an easy fix that anyone knows of that I don't, I'd love to hear it.

[Steve Guttag]

Incorrect information...removed

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Yes, the original had three wires with a tachometer out so the speed could be read. The new one may or may not have one. But if it does, it's not the correct tach out for the circuitry looking at the signal.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Also, This link seems to have the original.

Argh.

Note: This is only a 2 wire version... so disregard.

[Leo Enticknap]

Thanks Mark. I suspect that you're right, and that the tachometer/frequency wire cannot be read by the FCB for some reason. From the data sheet for the official Delta Electronics fan:

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So if I'm reading this correctly, a momentary .5V pulse is delivered between the blue (tach/frequency) wire and ground at each revolution of the fan. Maybe this aftermarket one I bought only pulses at .2, or for not a long enough duration, or there is some other characteristic of the signal that prevents the projector's fan control board from reading it? Or maybe the logic in the fan's controller is such that there is no tach pulse at all unless the yellow (PWM) wire is connected and receiving a signal? This would seem to me to be the only explanation that makes sense.

Just checked the projector remotely again: the light engine temperatures still all look very good, so in terms of its cooling performance, the aftermarket fan is working well. It's just super annoying that I can't kill that yellow tail light.

It was so annoying: after scouring the Internet for fans that could be delivered quickly and that didn't require me to place a minimum order of a whole assload of them, I simply could not find one of the same form factor, 24V, no more than 0.8 amps of current draw (I didn't want to risk one that was any higher, in case the additional current suck risked damaging the FCB, backplane, and/or SMPS), a CFM figure in the same ballpark, and 3-wire. I found several that offered all but one of these specs, of which the one I bought was the closest, but no exact match.

[Marco Giustini]

What about this one?

https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDeta...BaCY8pig%3D%3D

model FFB1224EHE-F00

https://www.delta-fan.com/products/ffb1224ehe-f00.html

It's very similar, it has a tachometer wire (the datasheet on Mouser says no but the datasheet on Delta says yes), everything seems to match?

A PWM fan could work without PWM but they're usually not intended to work that way.

[Steve Guttag]

Oddly, I did a search on that fan yesterday (and my post above that I deleted) where I though Mouser (and Digikey) had them but misread their data...they had zero but could order them in large multiples, as Leo had indicated. I see, via your link, Mouser has 99 of them in stock (as of this writing). So, either they just came in or something is different...perhaps searching from Europe would yield different results as one would have to factor in overseas shipping. I'm used to Newark/Farnell where one can definitely order from their Europe based warehouses but one has to allow for extended shipping times.

Still, this seems like it is a good solution.

In general, we are starting to stock up a bit on repair parts for projectors as they are all getting into the 10+ year range so things like fans are going to be a service item. For Barco, we've traditionally kept the LPS (it is great that one model effectively covers all of their xenon S2 machines), SPG, SMPS and now the electrical contacts from their C and B lamphouses. In fact, for "D" maintenance, I plan on swapping out the cable, lamp adapter, nut...etc. as a preventive measure. I'm seeing too many of them going bad due to too many thermal cycles. I'm not convinced that their star washer was the best choice for locking device...a wave or split washer would have been better, in my opinion. A star washer doesn't help with thermal cycles and once tension lessens, contact resistance goes up and then failure.

[Marco Giustini]

that's a slightly different fan, Steve. I also checked on the international website and it didn't change the stock. Even to the UK, Mouser ships from the US.

[Leo Enticknap]

Thanks, folks. I was looking for something that was available in small quantities (obviously I just wanted one, but ended up having to buy two - not a big deal, as the pair cost only $30), and quickly, which obviously ruled out looking at suppliers outside the US.

In general, we are starting to stock up a bit on repair parts for projectors as they are all getting into the 10+ year range so things like fans are going to be a service item. For Barco, we've traditionally kept the LPS (it is great that one model effectively covers all of their xenon S2 machines), SPG, SMPS and now the electrical contacts from their C and B lamphouses.

The reason I would not have wanted to buy that box of 36 from Digikey, even if they could have overnighted it, is that, in my admittedly limited experience, light engine fans don't just die. In fact, in six years of looking after these projectors, this is only the second light engine fan I've had to replace following failure (excluding ones in DP2K-12Cs, which are replaced preemptively at maintenance D, because their light engines have no liquid cooling system and that fan is the only means of cooling them). That compares to 4-5 SPGs a year, and 1-2 SMPSes: when a DP2K-XXC gets to 7-8 years old, it's a question of when it'll need a new SPG (for example), not if. But that isn't the case with the light engine fan, and therefore we couldn't have justified buying 36 of them on the grounds that we'd use them eventually. Given the rate at which Series 2 Barcos are being retired and replaced with laser (in this neck of the woods, at any rate), around 32 of them would likely have sat in our warehouse for 6-7 years and then gone in the dumpster in one of the annual purges of leftover parts for obsolete machines.

[Steve Guttag]

We are just now, starting to see fans die. There have been the oddball ones on the various projectors that have died but fans, not so much. I've had 1 or 2 of those fans (light engine cooling) die. Nobody around here are retiring their S2 projectors. What could change that would be light engine failure and the cost of repairing them.

[Marcel Birgelen]

If those fans have been running in a clean environment, most of them will easily last a year or 10, especially if those fans were brush-less, ball bearing designs. After about 10 years, the mechanical wear and tear will set in and you'll see an increased fallout. I've seen the same in IT systems in datacenters. After about a year or ten, stuff simply starts to degrade pretty rapidly, probably also because any remaining lubrication will since have evaporated and become sticky and gummy.

So if I'm reading this correctly, a momentary .5V pulse is delivered between the blue (tach/frequency) wire and ground at each revolution of the fan. Maybe this aftermarket one I bought only pulses at .2, or for not a long enough duration, or there is some other characteristic of the signal that prevents the projector's fan control board from reading it? Or maybe the logic in the fan's controller is such that there is no tach pulse at all unless the yellow (PWM) wire is connected and receiving a signal? This would seem to me to be the only explanation that makes sense.

From what I know the "standard" for fan tachometer signals is a square wave at TTL-level, so that would be about +5V compared to GND. A signal pulsed at +0.5V would be a strange signal as it would degrade very fast and would not be able to trigger most TTL logic without being amplified. Most fan controller logic is built with some level of headroom, but since this is a very specific controller board, it may require some more TLC.

If you have a reference fan, you could hook up the TACH signal to an oscilloscope and have a look at it.

[Jason Raftery]

Leo, is the part you're looking for Cinionic P/N B3247001DK (Fan for cooling the compartment of the Light Processor Unit DP-2000, DP-1500, DP-1200, DP2K-xxC & HDF)?

The one I just pulled out of a new Barco package is rated at 1.20A, not 0.80A. It's Delta P/N FFB1224SHE-T7LN.

[Marco Giustini]

The fan is rated 0.8A with a maximum of 1.2A - I suppose 1.2A happens when the fan is spinning up and/or when there is no airflow? During normal operations I believe it's going to be 0.8A and chances are that fan is not spinning at 100% all the time - only when the temperature goes up.

Does your have a different rating on the label?

[Marin Perkovic]

Is the fan the same one as for the heat exchanger? If so, I had good results using the Sunon EEC0382B1-000U-G99, with out any problems, PWM works.
https://www.tme.eu/en/details/eec038...82b1-000u-g99/
I'm in the EU, no idea where to find it in the us

[Leo Enticknap]

The current rating is lower (0.4 A as distinct from 0.8), so I suspect that its airflow (CFM) isn't as high, though annoyingly, the spec page you link to doesn't tell us. Other than that, it looks the same from what I can see.

The one I just pulled out of a new Barco package is rated at 1.20A, not 0.80A. It's Delta P/N FFB1224SHE-T7LN.

Interesting: the one I had that died was labeled FFB1224SHE without any suffix. However, this was in an old projector (a DP2K-20C manufactured in March 2011, per the label on the side): maybe the suffixes refer to batch numbers, and it's the same model of fan?