Boiler repairs and digital cinema equipment

[Frank Cox]

My ten year old boiler needed a new control board, which arrived a couple of days after ordering it. The new board looked very slightly different than the old one but it just snapped into place and was reprogrammed in exactly the same way.

I asked the boiler repair guy about these boards and he said that they're all pretty much the same across the whole line up from this company; a control board for a ten year old boiler works in a boiler that was manufactured yesterday too. Large capacity boiler, smaller capacity boiler, new boiler, old boiler, same control board in each one. He said you just have to tell the control board which model of boiler it's installed into and that list gets longer with newer boards, which makes sense.

So, supporting older equipment can be done. Building management people probably wouldn't stand for a company saying that your otherwise good five-figures-to-replace boiler needs to entirely ripped out and replaced at great cost and downtime because of a control board that's no longer available, so the manufacturers make sure that this doesn't happen.

I don't know if this is accomplished by keeping a large supply of spare parts or by using a forward-looking design that can be adapted to newer components as the years pass, but either way it's possible. The boiler manufacturers are doing it, so it can be done.

Which raises the question why we are putting up with this sort of obsolescence with cinema equipment.

[Randy Stankey]

I don't know for sure but I can make a few guesses.

First off, the relative difference complexity between the two types of systems.
For the most part, boilers have fewer inputs and outputs. (Thermostat, gas valve, temperature sensor, pilot light sensor or igniter and maybe a few other ins and outs.) I'd say that most things can be done with discreet logic and analog data. Compare that to the high-bandwidth, digital data streams that go through a digital projector. Not necessarily an excuse but it's probably easier to design a controller that fits many different boilers than it is to design one that fits many different projectors.

I think it's also more mission critical to keep a boiler running than a movie projector.
If a boiler goes down for a whole building or a section of a building, its pipes could freeze or other damage could occur. It makes more sense to keep the electronics as simple, robust and as interchangeable as possible. If a movie projector goes down, yes, you'll be out of business but, no, you're not going to have the risk of infrastructure damage that could require huge sums to repair or even cause permanent damage to the building.

Also, I think the level of competition between companies is different in the movie business than in the heating equipment industry.
As you probably know, most home appliances like washers and dryers are made by only a few companies. If your washer is a Whirlpool, a Maytag or whatever, many of them are made in the same factories, just with different labels. We even see this in the automotive business. My Mazda 626 was virtually the same car as a Ford Probe. Many of the parts for either car were directly interchangeable.
I don't know, for sure, how well heating equipment manufacturers are but I do know that many parts are interchangeable among brands because, even though they have different labels on them, different boilers were probably made by the same manufacturer.
Even though some of the boards and chips in digital projectors are made by the same companies, I get the impression that the overall designs are different enough that it would make parts interchangeability more difficult.

Do I think that these are good excuses for parts not being interchangeable? No, but I think it explains, at least partially, why some business decisions seem to be more bone-headed than others.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Most "DCI stuff" is just based on off-the-shelf solutions coming from the general IT space. Before we moved to "integrated servers", the first iteration of servers we had, all were essentially 19" rack-mountable servers with some add-on cards produced by some OEM suppliers. Even Dolby moved into that direction with their CP-850, before eventually returning to a more customized device with their CP-950. But at the core of most of those systems, are still solutions mostly based on existing IT stacks. Most IMSes still run some form of Linux and use some industry-standard off-the-shelf solution, for example.

But herein also lies the problem with interchangeability and durability. When we moved Digital Cinema essentially into the "IT sphere", we also moved it into an ever-changing environment, where technological iterations happen at a far higher pace than in most other industries, like heating or... just good old film projection. DCI is now intertwined with an industry, where the shelf-life of an "off-the-shelf" solution is no longer than a year or two...