Vista 20p Keypad Strangeness

I wired up one of my vista panels to a 6160 and it started to show strange characters on the screen. I’ve never encountered this problem before.




I powered it up and at first it worked normally, then when I opened one of the zones it started doing that. Now even when I power it up, instead of saying “Busy - Standby” like it would normally, half the screen has “))))))))))”

Have you tried it on another panel or tried a different keypad on that panel to see if that is the issue? Have you tried power cycling the panel?

If the keypad is still having problems after all of that troubleshooting, I think it could be a couple of things.

  1. It could just be the keypad’s display going bad. We have seen this many times on fire alarm panels and annunciators.
  2. It could be an issue with interference from the wire you are using. This a fixable issue, but it is a lot less likely.

I did hook it up to one of my other panels and it did the same thing. Probably just the keypad has gone bad. I got it used from an existing building so it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s gone bad.

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Its a bad keypad. When the panel starts up, it should say “Busy-Standby” and the panel version.

Yeah. Its very odd that it is doing that.