Sony KDL-40XBR5
10 October 2008, 06:06 by Chad Reynoldson
I recently had a residential project with several of the Sony KDL-40XBR5 LCD televisions. It has a 232 port on the back and a protocol document on the web.
The protocol is straight-forward and the cable is too, but looks are deceiving. After struggling with the unit for several hours, I was unable to control it or even receive any responses back from the unit (like error codes).
I finally started scouring the amx forums website. Many posters wanted to explain the checksum. Some posters said it is pretty vanilla and it just worked. Others, like me, we’re struggling.
Finally, a poster (kbeatyAMX, thank you) had said that they had some firmware issues which rendered the 232 port useless. The only way to get updated firmware was to take all of the units to a Sony service center. It seems the cut-off date on shipped products with bad firmware is February of 2008. That is funny, because early on I noticed a sticker on the front of the unit that said 2007 model and I had suspicions of this but no way to back them up.
We switched over to IR and used the discrete codes without any problems.
I post this here to save others who follow to not waste so much time on this device. Call it another av quirks mode.
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