Miconic A running on "Wildcar"

I have a 10 stop duplex. Every couple of weeks car on left ignores hall calls and stops in random directions at random floors. It does, however, answer car calls accurately. Cycling the line on both cars temporarily remedies the problem. Any suggestion on where to start with this? Haven't seen to much of this controller into short career.

I recently inherited a few of these. I don't know a lot about them, but what I do know is hard earned. What does the tool tell you under status/car and status/bank when this occurs?If LED DS11 on the MTV card is on it indicates which car is master. Off means slave and blinking means it is not talking to the master.If you are plugged into the master car then it will give you the FTR option under Stat-Bank. under FTR it should say Block operation, down peak, up peak or normal operation. Block operation means there is no dispatching to the group or hall button power. I had a lot of intermittent problems between the 3 groups that I have and a complete tighten down of all terminals on each controller made several of them go away.

Check the data link and HVMs. Probably an intermittent connection problem. Ususally a comm problem between them isn't fixed by a reset but by a board replacement.

On these units it's always a good idea to check power supplies. Not just at the supply unit! Right on the MTV board and other boards associated with it.

I couldn't agree more. I have one car in a 2 car group that .2 volts under voltage shuts the MTV card off and .2 volts over shuts the drive down. I am praying for a mod.

The ACVF's that I've worked on run great. Excellent advice about the powersupply and checking it at the MTV (at the plug connector or test point). Problem is the 5 volts daisy chains all over the place before it gets to the MTV. It's best to wire direct. IIRC, the voltage needs to be above 5.01 and not above 5.1.

How sensitive to heat are these units? I just replaced the two computer fans behind the DBR resistor because they weren't working.
I also just got the HHT. I work for an independent company so it took a while for me to get a hold of it. It is actually one of the simpler tools I have used. Only down side was that I could view all of the parameter but as soon as I hit "UPD" it just sent me back to the beginning of the menu. I assume this is some sort of proprietary lock out or something.
A more experienced friend of mine told me that those power supplies are ridiculously sensitive. I will have to check that. Is there anything you can do about voltage dips? Is there a trimpot or something that can pump up the volts?

Did you just get these units from a Schindler service? They did have a write up to address these issues a few years ago. And yes it is a constant battle between the 5 volts for the MTV board and to much voltage at the VEC board. The drive will just shutdown. I know one tech who had individual power supplies for control and drive board! This was never approved by engineering but the unit never had another problem with this issue?

One of my jobs has had very inconsistent building power. I talked to a Schindler engineer and his words were, "Schindler has never built a controller more sensitive to power fluctuations". I have replaced 2 of them with the OEM replacement from Adams. I had a 3rd that seemed to be failing. It actually was the wire crimps that slide into the plug on the wiring harness for the power supply. I changed those and the problem went away.The other 4 that I have, had all the power supplies changed to POWER ONE brand power supplies and I have had no problems with them. I had very little experience working on Schindler equipment until a couple of years ago. The HHT is a good tool once you learn to navigate it. If you now have the tool but no info on how to use it, PM me an email address and I will send you a good, straight forward write up on it.

Well, the Miconic on the other side of the garage was shutting down consistently with a "K9 DPOWER Error" or something like that. Started messing with the voltage on the PS1 power supply. Everything was fine as long as the voltage stayed in the 5.1-5.2 range.
At the beginning of the summer the issues started getting pretty bad so we mounted a computer fan above the supply and have not had a problem with it in over a week. We will have to keep an eye on it. I brought up the individual power supply solution to my super and he ordered an extra to install so we will see how that goes.
The other problem with the car not answering hall calls seems to be some sort of communication problem i think. When I looked up the car status with the HHT it stated that the car was running on "block operation". I looked that up in the handbook and it said that the "slave is not communicating with master or loss of communication at "FC Link 1".
I noticed that when the master car goes on wild car DS 11 flickers on the MTV board at a very fast interval. Furthermore, the slave cars' DS 11 light is solid red when the master is in error state. So it seems like the master car is getting lost in the hatch or something and transferring master operation to the other car. These elevators have optical sensors in the COP. If one of those misses a reflector could that trip some sort of error that would cause this? Just trying to think of easy solution first.

I'd clean the reflectors and sensors first. Also make sure the LED on the sensors are at 12:00 or 6:00. The FCB's and or HVM's go bad, wouldn't hurt to change the one associated with the sensors. Check the MTV PCB with the prints and make sure all the jumpers are correct.

Didn't know about the 12:00 6:00 thing. might have to look at that. Didn't think that would make a difference but I should know better. Some elevators shut down if you breathe on them wrong.

If you look at the lens on the sensor, you'll see a line separating the send and receive. You want that line vertical (LED at 12 or 6) so the beam goes out and comes back on a horizontal axis. Being on the edge of a reflector and a vertical axis may cause problems.

Well, a guy pretty experienced with this controller corrected the problem. The orientation of the jumpers across the top of the main board were all jacked up causing the communication problems. He got the right documentation and corrected the jumpers. Problem fixed.