Hi everyone !

We are relatively new in the automation business, and am certainly glad I found this forum. I think that this is a great forum with a lot of knowledge and experience. I apologize in advance for the long post, but I am hoping someone can help me solve this problem with our installation.

In one of our installations, we have a Xantech MRC88 controller – without the MRC keypads. The user interface is Xantech SPLCD39 touch panels for all the zones. Xantech XDT dual tuner is hooked up as well to sources 1 and 2, whereas other sources are hooked up to the MRC controller as well.

Everything was working perfectly fine with this installation, until Xantech came out with their new MRC88 / SPLCD “emulation” feature, which provides feedback from the MRC controller to the touch panels. When using this emulation feature on the touch panels (after upgrading the software and firmware for MRC and SPLCDs), we are experiencing strange behavior in the zones. Below are some examples:

•When a touch panel with emulation is connected to zone one, it works fine. But when another touch panel is connected to zone 2, and MRC88 is turned on, the zone 2 on MRC88 goes berserk and starts to turn on and off intermittently.
•When the same touch panel (from zone 2) is hooked up to zone 3, same strange behavior continues but this time the interval of zone 3 turning off and on is different.
•When we try to connect the zone 1 touch panel (which was working fine on zone 1) to zone 2 or zone 3, then MRC88 no longer goes berserk, however touch panel starts to go berserk i.e. volume bar goes up and down and the panel does not respond to commands.
•When we connect the other touch panels to zone one (which was working fine with the previous touch panel), the zone does not respond at all.
•On and on and on…

In other words, there is no consistency in the behavior of MRC88 and SPLCD touch panels. I have double and triple checked the programming – at both MRC and SPLCD’s. We have tested all the wires and RJ-45 connections to make sure that there are no glitches – even tested this with different patch cords. We have also gone back and forth with tech support ensuring that everything was done correctly. If it is of importance, it should be noted that the new XDT dual tuner is connected via RS-232 com port and this feature has been enabled in MRC88 programming for full feedback and integration.

At this point, I am of the belief that this may be a serious issue with products’ firmware or software – although I cannot be sure. I am really stumped right now. Has anyone used the emulation feature? Can anyone suggest to me what I may be doing incorrectly?

Thanks in advance !

What response did you get from Xantech's tech support?

Xantech tech support have actually been very good and are helping me resolve this issue. All the troubleshooting steps that I referred to in my original post (i.e. wire testing, changing zones with same SPLCDs and vice versa etc) were suggested by them – many of these troubleshooting steps had already been completed by me.

They also suggested ensuring that latest software and firmware versions were loaded in MRC and SPLCD units. They have also looked at the project that was loaded on these and found nothing wrong – yet. At this point, they do not know what is causing these issues but are looking into it.

I will probably end up sending a SPLCD unit back to them so that they can test it in their environment, but I really wanted to make sure that there was nothing wrong that I was doing on my end first.