Voice annunciators: no speech, wrong messages and speaker wiring

Start by proving the board itself can talk: connect a plain 8 Ω speaker directly to the speaker output and turn on S1 DIP switch 1 (test mode). If it talks in test mode, the problem is the speaker, the phone interface or the trigger signal; if it stays silent, the board is bad.

1. Check the speaker. Unplug the speaker connector from the voice board and measure resistance across the two speaker wires. It should read close to 8 Ω. Speakers that read 23 Ω (labeled 225 Ω) or 45 Ω will be very quiet or silent (see the speaker question below).
2. Make sure the speaker wires are on the two outside terminals of the black speaker plug.
3. With a tiny screwdriver, turn the volume pot (right next to the speaker output) all the way counterclockwise, then back it off about a quarter turn. You can raise it later once you hear speech.
4. On the S1 bank (farthest from the display) turn on DIP switch 1. The board goes into test mode and should start talking right away (it begins with a fire-return message and other announcements, and the voice display counts through the floors). Turn switch 1 off again when done.
5. If the “play” LED lights but there is no sound even with a known-good 8 Ω speaker wired directly to the board, the output amplifier on the voice board has failed. This can happen on boards that were knocked around in shipping or had metal shavings fall on them during installation. Send the board in for repair, or have it replaced through the company you bought it from and mention that you already went through this test with CE support.
6. If the board talks in test mode but not in normal operation, see the questions below about the trigger (strobe) signal, floor characters and the discrete-input conversion.

Use a standard 8 Ω speaker; CE recommends at least 20 W. The voice board drives the speaker directly – no external amplifier or speaker power is needed.

• A lower impedance than 8 Ω is a problem for the amplifier.
• A higher impedance (for example the “225 Ω” phone-style speakers, or a 45 Ω speaker) dampens the output like turning the volume down and will eventually destroy the final-stage amplifier on the voice board. A 225 Ω / 1 W speaker can be made to work for the moment by turning the volume pot almost all the way down, but replace it with an 8 Ω, 20 W speaker so it sounds better and the board lives longer.
• Small 8 Ω speakers taken out of an emergency phone (around 5 W) will work, but keep the volume pot low so you do not overdrive them.
• CE sells a 5-inch 8 Ω, 20 W speaker intended for its voice units; ask sales for the voice-unit speaker.

Yes, if the phone has an audio input for an external speech unit and its speaker is 8 Ω. The phone must be powered, and the voice board’s speaker output goes to the phone’s audio-in terminals, not to the phone’s own speaker.

• Phones with a secondary audio input switch the speaker between the phone and the voice unit automatically: when the voice unit talks, the speaker is switched to it.
• On a K-Tech phone, look for a small satellite board labeled “audio in” with a two-pin green (+/−) terminal block beside the main phone board; the voice board’s speaker wires go there. A short red/black harness from that board connects to the phone board. If the phone has only telco, relay, power and mic connections and no audio-in board, it cannot accept the annunciator.
• On a Workcom/Wurtech type phone the annunciator is wired to terminals 4 and 5, and that input goes through a relay contact on the phone board that is known to not always pick. Terminals 6 and 7 are also worth trying. If the board still does not talk with a plain 8 Ω speaker connected directly, the voice board is the problem, not the phone.
• Do not tie the annunciator output in parallel with the phone’s own speaker wiring – it distorts the phone and the annunciator does not work properly.

The board was supplied in the discrete-input configuration (VS3541 style, with the long transformer/input board) but you wired it to the 3-wire MicroComm data, so it is listening to the wrong input.

1. Check what you have: a VS3541 discrete unit ships with a second long board carrying a transformer. It needs 120 V AC on that board and a 24–48 V discrete signal per floor. A VM3541 is a single board powered from 24 V and fed with the 3-wire data (for example from a SmartRise SR2020 interface board).
2. If you are feeding 3-wire data and 24 V to a discrete unit, it will show “0” and never speak in normal mode even though test mode works, because it is “built to listen to the transformer board”.
3. CE can convert the board without sending it back: CE sends two files – a .BEC conversion file that tells the board to listen to the 3-wire input, and a .BNS sound file. Save both to an empty flash drive, make sure the transformer board is completely disconnected, turn all DIP switches off, plug the drive into the USB port on the main voice board and wait for “LC” on the display (see the USB loading question below).
4. After conversion leave every DIP switch off except, optionally, S3 switch 1: off gives “first floor, second floor…”, on gives “floor one, floor two…”. Match it to the other cars on the job.

Verify with CE support.

The floor characters the controller sends must sit in the right-hand (units) digit with nothing to their left, and the strobe LED must light when the doors open.

1. Look at the two-digit voice display. The floor character must be in the right-hand digit. If “1” or “2” is in the left-hand digit the board will not announce it. In the controller’s PI settings make the floor string “blank, blank, 1” – all the way to the units side, with every digit to the left empty.
2. The display only shows two characters. If the controller sends three (for example a hidden character or a “0” in the hundreds position, such as “0pH” instead of ” pH”), the board will not recognize the floor even though the display looks right. Motion 4000 controllers in particular are known for this – check the floor-character programming in the controller and remove any leading character.
3. Check the four LEDs beside the display: up, down, strobe and play. The strobe LED must light when the doors open; if it never does, the board has no trigger and will not talk. The play LED only lights while the board is actually speaking.
4. For a special floor such as “pH”, the speech file must contain that character. The standard speech file does announce “Penthouse” for “pH”. If someone may have loaded a different file, CE can email the standard file to reload (see the USB question).
5. If the same board works in another car with the same floors, the fault is in that car’s controller data or wiring, not the board. Swapping in a board from a working car is a valid test.

For a VM3541 using a MicroComm driver, check the driver’s play-strobe input:

• MCCA: Check for the correct voltage between STR and COM on J2 when the doors open. If voltage is present with the doors closed and drops out when they open, turn on MCCA S1 switch 3.
• SMCDU: Verify that an MAMM1 board is attached to the J4 message connector, SMCDU S1 switch 4 is on, and the correct voltage is applied between MSG8 and COM on the MAMM1 JP2 connector when the doors open.
• Direct controller interface: Contact the controller manufacturer to check its parameters. For a GAL Galaxy III or IV interface, switches 2, 3 and 5 should be on.

If these checks do not resolve the problem, contact CE support to check that the voice programming matches the floor markings.

Verify with CE support.

The board needs 24–48 V across “Play Strobe” and “Strobe Common” (connector J3) when the doors open, and Strobe Common is the return for that signal, not a feed. Tie Strobe Common to the same common you use for the binary floor inputs – normally a constant +24 V – not to controller ground.

1. Polarity does not matter even though the terminals are marked, but both wires have to be in the right circuit. If you measure 24 V on both terminals to ground and 0 V between them, the strobe is not seeing a signal.
2. On a controller whose outputs pull to ground when active (for example a JRT controller with binary floor outputs), connect Strobe Common to the same terminal the floor-input common is on (the constant +24 V return on the input board) and bring the controller’s door-open output to the Play Strobe terminal.
3. Watch the strobe LED: it should light fully for a couple of seconds when the doors open and be off otherwise. A strobe LED that is dimly lit all the time and does not get brighter when the doors open means the strobe circuit is wired wrong.
4. S1 DIP switch 6 sets the sense of the signal: leave it off if voltage appears across the two terminals when the doors open; turn it on if voltage is present while running and drops out when the doors open.
5. If you have been changing switches, unplug J3, change floors, set switch 6, then plug J3 back in with the doors closed and run to another floor. This procedure gets the board announcing floors.

NC means no communication between the MicroComm driver and the VM3541. Check the three-wire MicroComm data link and the driver’s output as described in position indicator driver troubleshooting.

The board announces only the characters that are in its speech file; a stock or standard file does not contain job-specific floor names.

• A replacement board shipped as a stock unit has the standard message set, so “P1” plays as “parking level one” and “G” plays as “ground”. CE keeps the original program for the job under the serial number of the original board and can send the correct .BNS file to load by USB. All cars on the same job normally use the same file. You cannot copy a program from one board to another in the field – the file has to come from CE.
• A standard file (for example a contractor’s standard ASCII floor set) announces “lobby” for L and “first floor” through “48th floor” for numbers, but when it sees “TP1” it says nothing because TP1 is not in the file. The PI may still show “P1” because it only has two digits.
• Floor names such as “tower parking”, “mezzanine” or “bridge” require a file built for that job. Contact sales with the serial number and a list of every floor character and what it should say. If the words already exist in CE’s library a new voice file is all that is needed; if not, a recording session is required first.
• The file is sent by email link or on a flash drive – you do not have to send the board in.

On a GAL Galaxy 4 controller this means the DIP switches on the Galaxy interface board (usually the car-top board) are set wrong: DIP switches 2, 3 and 5 on that GAL board must be turned on so the status messages map correctly to the CE voice unit.

The same settings apply to a Galaxy III interface. Wrong priority or emergency messages can also result from mismatched voice programming; contact CE support to check that the programming matches the required messages.

Yes – both behaviors come from the speech file, and CE can modify the file for your serial number.

1. By default the program will not re-announce a floor until a different floor has been announced. If a passenger reopens the doors at the same landing it stays quiet. CE can change the file so the floor is announced every time the doors open.
2. If the speech file was built to announce the main floor on “M” (star M) and the controller only sends “M”, the main floor is never announced. CE can set the file to announce main floor on either “M” or “M”. This is usually easier than changing the controller.
3. On this PI, turning on the S2 DIP switch with the value 64 (used to hide the large direction arrow) also disables “going up / going down”, because that message is tied to the 64th landing. If you want the small arrow without the big one and still want direction announcements, ask CE to remove the big arrows in the design file instead of using that switch.
4. The updated files arrive as a zip; extract both files to an empty flash drive and load them by USB as described below, then turn the S2 switch back off.

Verify with CE support.

Any CE voice board, including older units such as the 177A YX, can be reprogrammed from a USB flash drive with a file CE prepares, so speech can be updated after renovations, a new floor, or a language change. CE identifies the correct program from the serial number on the board’s label.

• The serial number (SN) on the board or paperwork is the CE order number. Boards with the same part number can carry different speech files, so always read the SN off the board itself – the sheet in the box may show a different (longer) number.
• Give the SN to CE support and they can tell you what file is on it (for example “standard female English/French” or “standard female English ASCII”) and which job it shipped to. Boards that do not match can simply be reloaded with the right file.
• For renovated floors, decide exactly what each floor should say and have the building owner approve it. Then call sales with the serial number and ask for a new speech file. Standard words (ground, lobby, basement, mezzanine, common department names) may already exist; anything new needs a recording session. If different cars must say different things you need one file per message set; if a new floor only uses a standard character, the same new file can be reused.
• If a floor is added, the controller must be programmed to output a character for it; the speech file then reacts to that character.

Download the file from the link CE emails you, save it to an empty flash drive, plug the drive into the USB port on the powered-up voice board and wait for “LC” on the voice display, then remove the drive.

1. Click the link in the email (on the SharePoint page, use the download arrow at the top left). If it is a zip, extract the files first. Save only the file(s) for that board – .BNS sound file, plus a .BEC conversion file if CE sent one – to an empty flash drive.
2. Leave the board powered. You do not have to power it down.
3. Plug the drive into the USB port on the main voice board. The display flashes some numbers, shows “rd” and a larger number, and finally “LC” (load complete).
4. Pull the drive out. The board reboots on its own and is ready.
5. If CE told you to clear the DIP switches before loading (conversion files), turn all three banks off first and set only the switches CE specified afterward.