“Data” or “Power”. If you are having problems with an LED display, it’s likely to be related to one of these two things. LED screens are great when they work, but if they stop working, they become a stressful eyesore. If you’ve got an LED display in your church, shop, business etc, you need your problems fixed quickly, and calling an in tech support can often be costly and unproductive. All LED displays work by daisy chaining data and power between multiple smaller LED sections (called cabinets), contained in these two cables is everything that is likely to go wrong with your screen. These are five common problems we’ve seen that are easy to fix yourself when you know how.
The whole screen is blank but the power is on
Data! If your whole screen is off, but you’ve checked your power, it’s most likely a problem somewhere between your sending card and your first cabinet. Check to make sure that the cat6 cable is plugged in at both ends, and if it is, try a diffent cat6 cable. If there is still no picture, try plugging it in to a different panel and see if you get a different result. If there is still no picture, you might need to check/replace your sending card.
A section (multiple cabinets) of my screen is blank
Probably power. Because LED displays draw a lot of power, it is really easy for them to trip their circuit in the power distributor. Great news is that you are using high quality sending and receiving cards, the data will keep running through to the next powered up cabinet, even if some of them have power off. Check the back of the cabinet for power lights, if they are off, go and reset the circuit. if the power lights are on, check the data cables surrounding the first blanked our cabinet, it’s possibly a loose data connection.
There is a cabinet in my screen that is intermittently flickering
Data. This problem is most likely a faulty daisy chained cable or a dodgy connection into (or out of) the cabinet. I had an infuriating time trouble shooting a client’s panel recently when I triple checked (and checked again) data and power. It looked like a data problem, power supplies and lights were all consistently on, but a cabinet would intermittently drop out or flicker. I finally got to the point where I was about to start replacing parts, went to take the receiving card out and it practically fell out of its contacts. This problem was ultimately a data problem, the receiving card wasn’t properly seated and needed to be pushed in properly. Once the receiving card was properly seated, the cabinet worked flawlessly.
There are black lines or lines of discolouration across my modules
Data. When you don’t know what’s going on, this is not a good feeling, but don’t freak out, it’s easily fixed. This problem can be a little more frustrating because it might mean replacing a module or a ribbon cable depending on the style of LED cabinet you have. The photo on the left is a style that needs a ribbon cable. If you’ve got a single module that has striped black lines across it, you probably have to replace that module (or make sure it’s properly seated). Just open up the back of the cabinet, and swap out a ribbon cable with your spares (which you should have received with your LED display when you bought it) and you should be back to normal in no time.
Sections of my LED screen are different brightnesses!
Data. Now this is especially common if you are using the screen for rental purposes and pulling it apart often to set it up in new configurations. If you have whole sections of your display that are different brightnesses, you don’t have a calibration problem, it’s most likely just a software brightness setting. Open up your control system (we use Novastar), select brightness, then choose a brightness and click save to hardware. There you have it, you’re screen should now all be a consistent brightness again.
Remember, LED screens are designed to be simple, so assuming you’ve purchased a high quality display, trouble shooting problems should be simple. Hopefully that was helpful to someone, let us know if you have any other common problems or anything you would like to know about LED video displays.
Dave
dave@churchled.com.au