Friday, January 28, 2011

Pro-Lite PL-M2014R Multi Color LED sign

I recently purchased two Pro-Lite LED signs on Ebay.  They were easy to fix, I just needed to replace the capacitors in the power supply. The old ones were 4700 at 16 volts, all I had was 2200 at 25 volts so I used them and they worked fine.  They are the blue caps on the left in this picture.

Here is a picture of both of the signs working.
Now to make a 9 pin to telephone jack cable so I can program them from a computer.


Getting the Pro-Lite signs to work.

The instructions say to make a 4 conductor telephone cable to a 9 pin female serial connector.  Red and Green go to pin 2 and 3 then the yellow wire goes to pin 5.  Well I tried 300 baud, 9600 baud, a sign ID number of 1 to 10 and nothing worked.  I reversed pins 2 and 3 to no avail.  I got out my voltmeter and checked pins 2 and 3 and they were right to begin with.  When they are wired correctly they should both meter about negative 2 to negative 5 volts.  I also found out that both the yellow and the black wire are ground and can connect to pin 5 of the 9 pin serial connector.

There were two solutions to my dilemma.  In spite of what the notes say both signs were configured to 2400 baud.  I figured that out by trial and error.  You are supposed to get a remote control and use that to find out what the baud rate and the sign ID is currently set to.  However if you select a sign ID of  ‘0’ it sends your message to ‘all’ or in this case ‘any’ sign that you have connected.  Telling it to display the time is an easy way to test the communications setup.  Once that is set you can move on to more advanced programming.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

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Henrique said...

Hello,

I would like to know if you can help me with Pro-Lite troubleshooting. My father has a model PL-M2014R stashed away for years. Recently, he found someone who would buy it, but when he unboxed the unit, it turned on normally, but it is not receiving any commands from the remote control. The remote is working fine (I tested it against my digital camera and it lights up ok). I suspect the IR sensor has gone bad.

Do you have any technical on the IR sensor and how to unassemble the unit and change it?

Thank you,

Bob Davis said...

It dissembles really easily and slides out of the enclosure. Are you sure the IR remote is working? Also they have a tendency to loose the baud rate in their CMOS settings, that might effect the remote control?

Henrique said...

If I use the remote agains a digital camera, the camera will capture the remote´s IR signal. Since it´s flashing I´m assuming it´s working OK. I´ve also tried to connect via rs232 building a cable but didn´t work. The sign seems to be stuck in DEMO mode...

Henrique said...

I pointed the IR LED on the remote to a digital camera and it lights up when I press some buttons (the camera can "see" the IR light), so I´m assumiing the remote is OK. Also tried building an rs232 cable but the sign does not respond to any commands. It seems to be stuck in "DEMO" mode... any ideas?

Unknown said...

A http://www.synergysigns.com/products/led-signs/ have a password I don't no how this possible.........

W.D. said...

Hello Bob,
I came up with a ProLite PL-XPM2014
w/no remote. I can not get it out of demo mode.Downloaded prolite 30 day demo program.It shows to be sending message to sign successfully
but it never shows up.I am using usb
to rs232 converter. Works fine on other signs I have. Have tried setting ID to 0 as you mentioned,
changed baudrate, I need Help
Thank You, W.D.

Unknown said...

Hello I am working on a prolite 2014r. The issue I am having is it keeps going from hello to checking I am wondering if this is the same thing you had before you replaced the capacitors. Thanks

Unknown said...

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spydox said...

Hi I bought an LED sign recently , - large like 50x16" and 3-leds per site. It has an RS232 port , but no LED receiver that I can find. Its 110v no batteries.

I bought a keyboard (KB-10) with RS232 female that did plug in but no joy - doesnt seem to work at all with this sign.

THere is no company name except SIGNSBYBOB.com !

Any thoughts?

TY

Bob Davis said...

SIGNSBYBOB is not me. LOL. But if you cannot communicate with it, then disassemble it and use an arduino to run it.