Direction lanterns, arrows and gongs

The lantern is still in its factory “travel arrow” state (all address switches off). It needs to be told it is a car-riding lantern, which sets it to floor address 127 so it listens to up and down arrivals no matter where the car is. With all switches off the arrow simply shows the direction of travel and the gong never fires.

INN3491-24 and M3491 gong boxes (two DIP switch banks)

These have a bank of eight (S1) and a bank of four (S2) on the bottom of the box. On this style of switch down is ON, up is OFF.

1. Bank of eight: switches 3 through 8 ON (1 and 2 stay OFF).
2. Bank of four: switch 1 ON (2, 3, 4 OFF).
3. For a rear in-car lantern use the same settings and also turn ON switch 3 on the bank of four. If the rear lantern then never responds, the controller is not sending rear arrivals; turn switch 3 back OFF and turn the volume all the way down on one of the two gongs so they do not both sound at once.

The gong starts working as soon as these switches are set. Units often ship with no switches set and no diagram, so check them before anything else.

SA125 and SA130 Micro Comm lanterns (one DIP switch bank, gong plugs into the lantern)

These lanterns drive the gong, so the setting is done on the lantern board. It is a two-step process:

1. On the bank of DIP switches at the bottom of the board, turn ON switches 3 through 8.
2. Find the two test-mode jumper pins about halfway up the board. Next to them are three identical resistors in a row. Cut loose the middle one (R10, marked “64”). Cutting it sets the address to 127.

Both steps are required; switches alone are not enough on this board. The rear-lantern resistor mentioned in the sheet should only be cut if the front lantern is working and the rear one does not respond, and then turn down the volume on one of the gongs.

For an MGONG-XX in-car gong, turn on S1 switches 3 through 8 and cut loose the resistor marked 64 inside the gong box. Refer to the MGONG diagram for its location.

If a voice annunciator is installed in the car it already announces “going up / going down”, so the gong is optional; both together can be noisy.

Hall units are addressed in binary on switches 3 through 8 of the bank of eight; the bank of four stays OFF and no resistor is cut. The bottom landing is always landing 1 no matter what it is called, and there is no “floor zero”.

If a hall lantern lights its travel arrow but never sounds, check its floor address and confirm that the matching TG024-BFM gong is connected using the orange connector.

The hall lantern lights and gongs only when the controller sends an arrival signal for that landing with the car at the door. If the bottom floor gongs and the others do nothing, the numbering was probably started at “floor zero” (all switches off, which is travel mode); re-address as above. One misaddressed lantern will fire at the wrong floor, but it will not make every lantern fire.

Only the TG024-BFM 24 VDC gong may be plugged into the orange pigtail connector on the lantern. Any other gong connected to that output will burn out the gong circuit on the lantern, so never splice a different gong onto the pigtail. If the fixture supplier shipped a gong without the mating orange plug, ask them for the TG024-BFM instead of cutting the plug off. If the lantern and gong are plugged together with the orange connector, that already rules out most problems.

On INN3491-24 and M3491 gong boxes the gong is built in and the box drives separate 24 V LED arrows through the output harness: green/black pair = up, red/black pair = down. Never tie the two black wires together, and do not connect the arrows to anything else.

Check whether the two black output wires are connected together. The unit maintains +24 VDC on its red and green wires and connects the corresponding black wire to ground for each arrival.

If the lantern has only one common wire, connect the red and green wires together to that common. Connect the black wire paired with green to the up lantern, and the black wire paired with red to the down lantern. Do not join the two black wires.

Test mode proves the board, its arrows and its gong work; the link voltage proves data is reaching it.

Test mode

• INN3491-24 / M3491: turn ON switch 1 on the bank of eight. The up arrow lights and gongs once, then the down arrow lights and gongs twice, repeating until you turn switch 1 OFF.
• SA125 / SA130: short the two test-mode pins (a small screwdriver works if no jumper was supplied). Same up-once / down-twice pattern until you short them again.

Travel-arrow check: with all DIP switches OFF, run the car. The arrow should light in the direction of travel (no gong). If it does, the board is receiving data it understands and the problem is the arrival signal or the address. If nothing lights, the board is not seeing usable data.

Link voltages (meter on DC, black lead on terminal 1, red on terminal 3):

Terminal 1 to 2 should read the supply (24 V, about 30 V on some drivers); below 20 V at the far end of a run will cause problems. Do not swap wires 1 and 3 to “see what happens”; you will read something like 3.7 to -4.1 V and the lantern goes dark until the wires are restored.

Both arrows lit constantly (or one arrow lit and not responding to the car) almost always means the lantern is not seeing valid Micro Comm data. Work through this order:

1. Put the unit in test mode. If it cycles correctly the hardware is fine.
2. Set all switches OFF and run the car. If the arrow does not track travel, the problem is upstream of the lantern.
3. Measure 1 to 3 at the lantern. A steady 8.3 V with the lanterns unplugged means the driver board is not generating data. If the voltage is 8.3 V at the controller too, the data chip (U8) and the output transistor on the driver are the suspects and the controller manufacturer has to resolve it.
4. If the reading is low (around 1.2 to 1.5 V), disconnect all but one lantern and see if it comes back up; if it does, something in the hoistway wiring is loading the line.
5. If a single arrow stays lit even in test mode and swapping the arrow lantern itself makes the fault follow the lantern, replace the lantern; if the fault stays on the output, the gong board is at fault.

On Elevator Controls Pixel controllers, INN3491-24 lanterns can pass test mode and have 1.5 to 1.7 V of data but still stay lit or dark while the Micro Comm PI on the same link works. The lanterns look for landing numbers and arrival bits in the data, while PIs only need the floor characters, so a PI working does not prove the lantern data is right. This needs to be reviewed by CE engineering. Verify with CE support.

The controller output is pulsing: the arrival signal is switched on and off repeatedly instead of being held, so the arrow flashes and the gong fires again and again (three dings, fifteen dings, or until the door closes). The lantern is doing what it is told; the fix is on the SmartRise side.

The known cause: the SR2020 board (the board with the CE chip that feeds the Micro Comm link) is mounted in the COP and wired to the COP SRU board. It must be connected to the car-top SRU board (the car-top C3 channel). Moving the connection to the car top stops the flashing and repeat gonging. Also check that the small selector switch on the SR2020 is set to C4. If the SR2020 is already on the car top and the output still pulses, that has to be resolved with SmartRise.

The controller’s arrival outputs are active at the wrong time. Hall lanterns fire when they see their own landing number plus an up or down arrival bit, so if the arrival output is on while the car is moving, or fires early while the previous landing number is still being sent, each lantern fires as the car goes by.

On an Otis controller using CE OCDL boards with INN3491-24 lanterns:

1. Turn on DIP switch 1 on the OCDL; it should count through the floor labels (for example L2, L1, G, 1 to 7). If it counts random numbers the EPROM is not the correct one.
2. Confirm the OCDL address (normally 50). At address 50 the controller’s CDLU (IO380) and CDLD (IO378) outputs are expected at 54 bit 3 and 54 bit 4.
3. Confirm every lantern’s binary address.
4. Have someone watch a mid-building lantern while the car runs from bottom to top. If it fires as the car passes, CDLU/CDLD is on during travel and the controller logic must be changed so it pulses once only at arrival.

Three (or four) dings on a down arrival means the controller is pulsing the down output twice. CE already gongs twice for down, so the controller should pulse it once.

The double gong is turned on in the controller, not on the gong. The M3491 gongs are addressed per landing in the normal way (bottom landing = switch 3, then binary) and will produce a double gong when the controller’s data stream contains the “double gong bit”. That bit is a parameter in the iBox software, so ask the controller manufacturer where to enable it.

Long runs, insulation-displacement (“Scotch tap”) splices and 24 V wiring run beside 120 VAC pick up AC coupling and load down the data line. The PIs usually keep working, but the lanterns, which depend on a clean serial pulse train, stay lit or stop responding. Typical measurements are 60 to 80 VAC of coupling on the +24 V wire and data readings dropping from a normal 1.56 to 2.1 V to 1.3 to 1.4 V as soon as the long run is connected.

What to do:

1. Replace tap-type splices with properly stripped, wire-nutted or terminal-block connections and keep the Micro Comm wires away from AC wiring. Rewiring a hoistway this way restores normal operation.
2. A 0.1 µF capacitor across 1 and 3 at the far end of the run is the traditional cure, but on Elevator Controls Pixel drivers it is too much capacitance: it rounds the data pulses into triangles and makes things worse. Use a 0.047 µF non-polarized capacitor instead, across 1 and 3 at the farthest device.
3. Check 1 to 2 at the farthest device; it must be at least 20 V.
4. If the voltage or data is still low, add a Micro Comm repeater (signal booster) in the machine room. Connect only terminals 1 and 3 from the controller to the repeater input (leave 2 off so the repeater does not back-feed the controller’s supply), and feed all three wires from the repeater output to the lanterns and PIs. The repeater has its own supply and can drive about 30 devices.

Something is different about the hall link: either its data is being loaded down, or the controller is not putting arrival information on the hall link.

On an MCE iBox the slim blue driver board has separate car and hall outputs, each with a plug-in 51.1 Ω resistor. Measure terminal 1 to H-data with the hall connector plugged in and unplugged:

• Unplugged reads about 2 V but plugged in drops to 1.1 to 1.4 V (and the same drop appears if you move the hall connector to the car output): the hoistway wiring or a lantern pigtail splice is loading the line. Run a single three-wire drop for all hall lanterns, tap each floor off that one drop, and check every butt splice. If the resistor measures fine, it is not the cause.
• Reads normally with everything connected but the lanterns still only work in test mode: temporarily parallel one hall lantern onto the car link (black to 1, red to 2, white to 3). If it gongs there, arrivals are present on the car link but not on the hall link; the controller may be sending ASCII instead of scan-slot data on the hall side. Verify with CE support.

No. None of those have lantern outputs; you need a Micro Comm lantern driver on the same three-wire link.

• VM3541 / VS3541 voice annunciator: the J3 connector is an input (for discrete up/down arrival signals when the controller cannot put them on the data link), not an output. Parallel the three Micro Comm wires that feed the voice board to an M3491 (sold through fixture houses as INN3491-24); its green/black and red/black outputs drive 24 V LED arrows and it has the chime built in.
• THY02 interface board (CE30650): converts the controller’s CAN bus to a three-wire Micro Comm output. Run it to the MH122 display and parallel an INN3491-24 off the same three wires for 24 V arrows and gong; address it for the car or landing as described above.
• Binary PI driver with discrete (DMG-type) lanterns: a small PI driver programmed for a binary floor input has no place to land arrival signals and cannot drive one-wire-per-floor lanterns. The controller must have single up-arrival and down-arrival outputs, and you then need a message board on the driver to accept them plus Micro Comm lanterns with their matching gong. Standard discrete lanterns from the fixture supplier will not work with this driver. Verify with CE support.
• M3491-1A (black and green wires only) is the character / signage version used with destination-dispatch “letter” fixtures. It lights a character when the car is at its addressed landing and is not an up-once / down-twice arrival gong. If you need arrival gongs you need the standard M3491. Verify with CE support.