Matrix Orbital Corp

Hi,
I have an MX212 that I use to control the fans on my system. I'm having occasional problems that seems to be of a hardware nature. Sometimes when the system is rebooting and the display backlight is supposed to be off, it will flicker at ~20% light until windows starts when it lights up.

Second, the GPO outputs are supposed to initialize to 100% until the LCDC fan control takes over, and after some reboots, they don't. The GPOs start up at something like MINIMUM output which stops one fan and barely turns the other. This is pretty bad when these fans are what keeps the system at safe temps, especially if you're running something like memtest86 which bypasses windows.

Finally, it sometimes happens (also after reboots) that LCDC will appear to connect to the display correctly (no error message and the LCDC "virtual display" pages through the pages) but the display seems to have locked up. While the 1-wire probe reads apparently work, the screen doesn't actually update and worse, the GPOs don't work either so after a short while the system becomes dangerously hot. I think this is a MX issue, because usually LCDC will display an error if it can't connect to the display, and I can see it's trying to tell the fans to go up on the virtual display only nothing happens on the outputs.

So what do you think? Is my display going south and will the warranty cover this problem? I got it in March 06.

Thanks,

/Patrik

Is there no MO guy here that can tell me if this is normal or not?

An additional piece of info: before the usb is initialized (like in memtest86+), the fans connected to the GPO outputs seem to change speeds in an apparently random way. Every now and then (on something like 5 minute timescales) they will speed up or slow down. I don't think this is supposed to happen, right? It puts the system in real thermal jeopardy when running outside of windows.

Question: Should the startup GPO PWM outputs that are saved in the display apply only when the usb is initialized and the backlight turns on, or immediately when the system is powered up? Given that they are meant to run fans, I sincerely hope they are meant to function immediately regardless of the usb state.

Hi Patrik,

Sorry for the delay in responding. Are you using the internal, or external USB cable to connect to the display? The internal cable tends to be more sensitive to static, and can cause the display to apear to have 'locked up'. The solution to this is to either use the external usb cable (and route it through the back of your case) or to place a ground wire (you may ground the wire by connecting it to your case), and then connect the other end to the metal covering underneath the plastic of the internal USB cable.

The fans on the display are intended to start immediately on power up. Please see this post for changing the default fan state:

http://www.lcdforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3480

--
Jon

Jon wrote:Sorry for the delay in responding. Are you using the internal, or external USB cable to connect to the display? The internal cable tends to be more sensitive to static, and can cause the display to apear to have 'locked up'. The solution to this is to either use the external usb cable (and route it through the back of your case) or to place a ground wire (you may ground the wire by connecting it to your case), and then connect the other end to the metal covering underneath the plastic of the internal USB cable.

The fans on the display are intended to start immediately on power up. Please see this post for changing the default fan state:

Sorry for me being slow, too. I've been traveling.

I'm using the internal cable currently, though the flicker issue was occuring also before when I used the external cable. I'll try grounding it.

However, the fan startup seems to be incorrect then. I'm familiar with changing the default GPO state, and most of the time it does correctly start. Sometimes, however, the GPOs seem to go into an off-state when rebooting. To be specific, the fans speed up correctly when LCDC exits, but when the system restarts, the GPOs turn off. This doesn't seem correct. It preferentially seems to happen when rebooting, not when cold starting.

So the new display works fine, it displays ( ) none of the peculiar behaviors of the old one. Thanks!