ATEM 1M/E Power Supply thermal analysisBackground: It has been observed, that ATEM 1M/E switcher (the old, non-4K, now obsolete model) tends to die completely after 1 year. Multiple people have experienced this, see http://www.atemuser.com/forums/atem-vision-mixers/blackmagic-atems/dead-1-yr-old-atem-1-me-production-switcher-fixable . In my personal context we have seen 4 such switchers installed for 24/7 usage, all of which died within 2-4 weeks about a year after their installation. We had them all changed under warranty (end of 2013), but the replacement units are now failing as well (end of 2014). However, 1 such replacement unit is still working, but should statistically die in a few weeks.We therefore decided to take it apart before it breaks down and compare it to a completely fresh unit we had lying around.

Here is a regular and a thermal image of the coil 1-2 minutes after powering it up:

Fresh 1M/E Nearly-dead 1M/E

The highlighted coil is the one known to look much worse when a switcher is finally dead. Here we see significant coloring compared to the fresh unit above it.

The two coils on the fresh unit has almost the same temperature

On the nearly-dead switcher, the right coil (that will soon fail) is a bit warmer (purple, not almost black)

However, the increased temperature of the soon-to-fail coil is not off by many degrees. On a thermal photo of both fresh (top) and worn (bottom) 1M/E, the difference seems quite small. But it seems to be the hottest of the four similar coils found on each 1M/E.

Below is a photo of the internals in general as well as a thermo image of the FPGA:

First of all, seeing that the FPGA was at 83 degress celcius made us stop the investigation at that point since obviously the heat sink was missing when the unit is open. But it's still kind a funny to see how the soon-to-die 1M/E has some much cooler regions on the FPGA. Of course we didn't check if they were configured completely equal and running the same firmware, it's just a curious

phenomena I guess,

We intend to make a preempty strike on the worn ATEM switcher: Simply changing the coil now with a replacement and see how it goes... maybe it has another year of service time then...

– kasper