NovaStar MON300 Monitoring Card

What is the NovaStar MON300?

If a cabinet in your screen is on its way to failing, the NovaStar MON300 is what tells you before it does. It is a monitoring card that sits inside one cabinet and watches what your receiving card cannot: fan speeds, power supply voltages, temperature, humidity, the door, and smoke.

It sends all of that back to NovaLCT over the connection your screen already has. So a fan slowing down in cabinet 14 reaches you as a line on a monitoring page, not as a dark patch three weeks later.

NovaStar builds it for engineering projects and installs with high safety requirements — the ones where somebody has to answer for the screen, not just look at it.

Will the MON300 fit your receiving cards?

Two of them, and only two: the MON300 fits the MRV320 and the MRV560. It goes at the far end of your module chains, with a 16-pin flat cable running back to the receiving card, so a different receiving card in your cabinets makes this the wrong part.

There is a bigger question ahead of that one, though, and it can save you the whole order. If your cabinets run A-series receiving cards — A5s Plus, A8s, A10s Plus and the rest of that line — you probably do not need a MON300 at all.

NovaStar gives those cards two other ways to report the same kinds of readings, called smart-module monitoring and HUB monitoring. NovaLCT reads them straight off the receiving card, with no extra hardware fitted.

So the MON300 is a part for an installed base. You order it when you are maintaining or extending an older MRV320 or MRV560 screen and want monitoring on it. It is not what you specify into a new build.

If you are not sure which cards are in your cabinets, the receiving card chart lists the family each model belongs to.

What the MON300 watches

Eight power supply voltages and four fan speeds

A power supply that is drifting low and a fan that is slowing down both kill a cabinet eventually, and neither announces itself. The MON300 reads voltage on up to eight supplies and speed on up to four fans. You set an alarm threshold on each one in NovaLCT, so the warning reaches you while it is still a maintenance visit.

One condition applies to the fans and not to the voltages. NovaStar specifies a fan with a pulse signal output cable for speed detection, so ordinary two-wire cabinet fans report nothing back. Check what is fitted in your cabinets before you count on that half of the feature.

Temperature and humidity with no extra module to buy

Both sensors are on the card already, so unlike a multifunction card you are not adding a separate probe on a lead to get these two numbers. Humidity is read from 1% RH to 99% RH.

One warning goes with that, and it is the kind that ruins a batch. NovaStar states plainly that conformal coating must not be applied to the MON300 surface, because it can stop the humidity monitoring working. If your cabinet assembler coats boards as standard, tell them this one is excluded.

The cabinet door

The card reports whether each cabinet door is open or closed. On a public-facing or roadside screen that is the cheapest theft and tamper alert you will fit, and it costs you nothing extra once the card is in.

NovaStar MON300 specifications

The row to measure against your cabinet is the height, because the card has to find room in a cabinet that is already full. Two more things are worth knowing: the card takes its own DC 5 V feed from a cabinet power supply rather than from the receiving-card link, and the smoke sensor carries a tighter humidity limit than the card itself.

Figures come from NovaStar’s MON300 Monitoring Card Specifications V2.2.0. The 22.5 mm is the board plus the tallest components on both sides, not bare board thickness.

Will per-LED detection work on your modules?

Three things have to line up in your modules and cabinets first, and they are worth checking before you order rather than after. The headline feature — finding a single dead LED instead of hunting for it — is the one with conditions attached.

Your module driver IC has to support LED error detection in the first place. Your hub board has to support it too, and the same goes for the flat cable fault detection.

The third condition is the one that catches people. NovaStar specifies that your modules must run 1/16 scan or below for the monitoring card to do per-LED detection. The card also has to sit in the connection between the module and the MRV320 or MRV560. A 1/32 scan module is outside that.

The scan rate is the one to settle first. It is the quickest of the three to answer, and the one most likely to rule you out.

Everything else on the card — voltages, fans, temperature, humidity, door, smoke — works without any of those three conditions.

How many MON300 cards to order

One per cabinet you want to monitor, and that is also the ceiling. NovaLCT asks you how many monitoring cards are connected to each cabinet and accepts only 0 or 1, so a second card in the same cabinet buys nothing.

You do not have to fit every cabinet. Monitoring the cabinets that hold the power supplies, or the row that sits in full afternoon sun, gives you most of the warning for a fraction of the count.

If you want smoke to trigger an automatic response rather than just an alert, NovaStar requires an MFN300 multifunction card configured beforehand. Budget for that alongside the monitoring cards if a shutdown-on-smoke rule is the reason you are buying.

MON300 datasheet and NovaLCT setup

No screen configuration lives on a MON300, so swapping one puts no cabinet map at risk.

One NovaLCT feature is worth knowing about before you start pulling cabinets apart. If the monitoring card’s wiring has ended up in the wrong order, a data set exchange function swaps the data groups in software instead. A wiring mistake found at commissioning is then a settings change rather than a rewire.

NovaStar MON300 FAQ