SMART Board MX275 Issues

[networkmangler]

Has anyone got a SMART Board MX275 interactive display installed and can tell me which cables they have used and also what computer they have connected to it.

 

We had a company install 3 of them yesterday and are having a nightmare getting anything to connect to it

 

One issue is that the teachers desk is within an island setup. There is conduit that goes from the desk, under the floor then channelled in the wall and then comes out in the dado under the screen. The conduit is about 5 meters

 

At the moment the only cable we can get to display is via a 2 meter HDMI cable. We tried a 5 meter cable, the board detects something is plugged in, tries to load but doesn't display anything. We tried some HDMI over Cat6 adapters and they do the same, detects an input but doesn't display anything

 

We tried a few different computers and a laptop but got the same problem so I'm assuming its a cable issue rather than a computer issue.

 

The guys that installed it said they have never had this issue before and are going to get a few different cables and come back to try them. They said that they think the issue might be because the screen is 4k and doesn't like inputs that are less than that

[IRL]

We've had some 4k screen fitted recently and have had similar issues. We've resolved this by changing the refresh rates on the laptops to 60hz or dropping the resolution to 1080p.

[hallb15]

We have over 20 of these (well the smaller mx265) and the only 2 times we have had issues is with cheap 5M HDMI cables and with low powered, small form factor PCs with laptop style power bricks instead of a proper desktop PSU.

 

We have our desktop PCs connected to the mx265 via a 5M HDMI cable to HDMI 1 on the mx265 and via a 2M VGA cable to a 24" monitor on the teacher's desk.

 

They can be quite fussy as to what resolution and refresh rate you are sending out the HDMI. You could try setting different outputs and see what you get, but the HDMI 1 input is HDMI v2.0 compliant so should be able to take pretty much anything you throw at it.

 

The cables are likely to be the cause of the issue. If the cables are only HDMI 1.4 spec, they'll only support 4K @ 30Hz.

 

There's some useful info regarding installation best practises here:

https://downloads.smarttech.com/media/sitecore/en/support/other/installbestpracticesv01mar19.pdf

Page 57 talks about cables.

[TriggerHappyUK]

We're getting the same issue too. We had 15 MX286 screens installed over the summer.

 

I did some Googling and found HDMI has 3 Categories. Category 1 - Standard (1080i 720p), Category 2 - High Speed (1080p 4K) and Category 3 - High Speed (8K)

 

The HDMI cables that we have purchased to go from faceplate to PC are 1m-2m Cat3 HDMI.

 

I contacted the reseller and all the boards were fitted with 5m HDMI. Most of which have turned out to be Cat 1. Smart recommend that only a 3m HDMI cable is used from the screen to the PC. This is very unlikely in a classroom environment.

 

I have arranged for the installers to come back in to (hopefully) swap out the Cat 1 cables to Cat 3

[networkmangler]

We changed the refresh rate to 60Hz and it worked

 

We used the HDMI over Cat6 adapters

 

Thanks all for your help and advice