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Paul

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I'll let you know if it fries again.

Any other suggestions?

Paul

However, when I rolled up the film spewed on the floor, I attempted to re-start, followed by an immediate shutdown again. Once more a re-start, motor restarted ok, the film motion and film presence led's were lit on the fail-safe, but one film status LED's was "off" (I honestly can't remember which one it was...) on the automation. (no reason whatsoever.) Then, No. 3 shut down when the lamp in no. 2 finally fired, and the LED on the film status lit.. When #3 was restarted, the lamp on No. 2 went out, and it would not come on until I manually over-road it at the automation. The motor was running on automation, but the sound format had to also be manally over-ridden. At the end of the show, I brought it down manually, except for the motor. On film tail-out, the alarm went off again, and the motor shut down just like it was supposed to.

Did Bill Gates write the program?

I think two things happened here which was intially caused by my screw-up of not turning on the take-up motor.

1. The automation froze in the middle of the cycle. (This would account for the possibility of frying another CO Open coil.
2. The automations are talking to each other through space or the power lines. (they are not connected via any interlock circuit whatsoever). Seems kind of odd when one Xenon lamp fires, it shuts down another projection station without sounding an alarm.

Nice, huh? <I wander off talking to myself...> Hmmmm. I think I have a grounding problem.

Back again....Oh, by the way - I am using switcher power supplies for the Xenon lamps. Strong International type, driving 3000w lamps.

Anyway, now this is what I call "Bad Start".

Paul

It was reported to me today that the TA-10's in the two houses had a great day talking to each other, and shutting each other down like cats and mice. Starting up #2 would shut down #3. Then when #3 was re-started, it shut down #2. After trying to re-start #2, it again shut down #3. The projectionist got so frustrated she rebooted the whole damn thing, from the ground up. She finally got both No. 2 and 3 running.

So I went to the theater, pulled the covers off the power panels, and made a very careful inspection. I noted that the electricians forgot to pull a separate ground into the power panels, and the entire projection stations were basically "floating". Apparently there may be a loose compression fitting somewhere in the EMT maze in the ceilings and rafters which might be preventing a good ground to the projection station raceways, pull boxes, flex EMT, xenon power supplies, pedistals, etc.

I took a No. 8AWG wire and bonded the neutral to the ground, as the neutral was grounded anyway in the main distribution panel.

Then it occured to me that it may not have been the automations causing all this trouble. It may have been lamp ignition emitting a high level of RF (which they certainly do). The poorly grounded projection stations acted like huge antennas. I have a tendency to believe this RF was getting into the automation's CPU, and driving it nuts. I can also see that it might be possible for a CPU to get so confused that it closed the CO Open relay and fried its coil, just like these damned PC's and their "Illegal Functions and will now self-distruct, Press any key to continue".

So far, so good. There were no additional reports that came to me today saying that more shutdowns have occurred.

I think I found the trouble.

Time will tell.

Paul

Please tell me you are going to go back and pull in the proper ground wires rather than leave the current neutral-ground thing.

Certainly the grounding issue must be resolved to clear the problem and while experimenting, anything goes but neutral/=ground except right after the step down transformer...hence on the first panel after the transformer, the Neutral buss and ground buss may be the same. It is also an indication that the panel is the first in the line of any further subpanels.

Once proper grounds are pulled in, noise supression will be significantly better for everything concerned, including sound and your rectifier's diodes. I, not too long ago, had a theatre where the diodes were failing at an amazing rate and they weren't overheated...come to find that the lamphouses had such a good paint job, the ground was compromised and that the caps in and around the igniter had nowhere to drain to...after using star washers on the lamphouses to ensure good ground to the chassis, problems vanished overnight.

Steve

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I was reluctant to even experiment with this thing. But one thing I can say - it is a new building, and the electrical contractor is the one who is going to get that building up to code. I don't know how it slid by the electrical inspector in the first place. It is a major job, and I don't have the equipment to perform such an operation.

Also, it is uncertain what was done in other sub-panels. As it stands right now, if we dump the main neutral and have a major load imbalance, all or very much of the EMT could come "hot"!

Gordon, you are also correct. Ground wires are pulled trhough the flex now. It used to be that if it was less than 5 feet, it did not need a separate ground.

Now, the real task is going to be getting all the hoop jumping, feet kissing, and finger pointing behind us so that this job can be finished correctly.

(and you know how that goes..)

In these days when so much of the electronics is microprocessor based, and when there are far more sources of EMI/RFI and all kinds of nasty spikes, harmonics due to computer switching supplies, etc. on the AC lines, it is absolutely imperative to have the best possible wiring and grounding done. Electricians need far more training on the problems and solutions regarding sensitive electronic equipment. Contractors need to learn to do things the right way and not "their" way. Building owners/cinema corporate people need to hold the electrical contractors' feet to the fire and not let them get away with ANYTHING wrong. There is just too much expensive and sensitive equipment in projection booths to settle for anything less than a first class power distribution system. I believe this will correct many of today's problems.

------------------
Oscar Neundorfer
Chief Engineer
SMART Devices, Inc.

For the most part, the grounding did take care of the problem. But one more problem popped up. Manual shutdown or fault shutdown on one machine took out one of the other machines, too.

After banging my head on the wall, I looked up and saw that a strange pipe was also coming out of the speaker wire pull boxes on the wall. All of the speaker wire pull boxes were connected together.

Hmmmmmm....Seems as though the installer used the speaker wire pull boxes as a non-sync feed from the other projection stations. Also, I noticed a Beldon 8451 cable interfacing all of these pull boxes. I followed the wires out, and those wires went into the automation. After yanking the covers off the TA-10's, the 8451 was connected to the "Data port" terminals.....

Since we don't and never will use this option, I disconnected all of those wires to the data port terminals on all automations.

Between the grounding problems and this data port thing, it has been a rollercoaster ride to find out what the hell was wrong.

Things seem to be running normally now, except for the igniter in No. 2 sometimes does not ignite, and the motor on No. 3 takes to long to build up to speed. Film Motion Fault shuts it down. But these two problems have also been with us since day one, so those are different problems to solve in the near future. There are lots of other minor problems that have to be addressed, such as movable masking that doesn't want to move, some more platter motors that are in poor shape, mis-cut aperatures, things like that.....

I am beginning to think this was a bad installation.

I am glad I had nothing to do with it.

Paul

I still wonder why the data port cables were pulled through the speaker wire raceways......Arg! I would never do that.....

I also removed the bonds between the neutral and grounds that I installed in the power sub-panels. But we are still waiting for an electrician to get us up to snuff.