Jacuzzi J-400 LED Lighting Control

[seb101]

Hi all,

Does anyone know the details of how the LED lighting controllers (DCUs) on Jacuzzi tubs are wired/controlled?  I have inherited a J465 tub that was 'upgraded' at some point with a Balboa BP2100/TP800 control system.  Whoever did the conversion managed to keep the Audio system working but evidently gave up on the lighting.  All the LED wiring is intact but left disconnected inside the housing.

What I appear to have is 2 blue 'DCU' distribution boxes, one on the right and one on the left of the tub, these are still wired up to the individual LED lights in the footwell, headrests, cup-holders and waterfall.  Presumably, the DCUs needed a power connection and a control signal to command them to specific colours.   There appears to be 3 cables from each DCU, which I believe are:

1. Power (2-wire)
2. Power Switch (2-wire)
3. Control (6 wire)

Does anyone have any insight into how these DCUs are controlled?  Is it a proprietary control signal?  Or is it a simple RGBV- or RGBWV- type LED control found in typical LED strips?

Also, does anyone know what voltage the DCUs and LEDs are supposed to run on?

Thanks!

 

 

[seb101]

In the absense of any information that I can find online, I'm going to attempt this myself!

I have seen reference to enough mentions of '15V' for the LED system in Jacuzzi that I'm going to start with 15VDC as an assumption, if I blow anything up, I'm in no worse position as nothing works currently!  Worse case, it might be 15VAC which will be a nightmare anyway as there are no generic VAC LED controllers on the market.

The plan is:

1. The BP2100 outputs 10VDC 5A max on a 'lights' circuit, I'll pass this through a DC/DC buck converter to get 15VDC and apply this to the DCUs and see if I get any light output at all.  I'm hoping this will light them up in a deafult state but also may do nothing if there is no control signal.

2.  I have to assume the 5-wire control system is RGBWV+ it's unclear if this runs on the same 15V as the DCUs but in the absense of any other information I'll assume it does.  The trickiest part is going to be working out the assignment of the wiring pins, reversing the polarity on an LED can zap it instantly so I'm going to experiment on a broken pillow light fixture that needs to be removed in any case.

3. If the bench tests prove positive I'll wire in a Zigbee enabled 12-24VDC RGBW lighting controller and go for it!

 

Watch this space...

[seb101]

OK, so I'll share my learnings here for future tubbers to use if they need!

As expected the control system is a simple 5-wire RGBWV+ and operates at 15V.

There are two 5-wire connectors that originally plug into the Jacuzzi controller to the DCUs (one each side of the tub), the wiring is as follows:

Wire     LED
Green    RED
Red      15VDC +
Yellow   BLUE
Black    GREEN
White    WHITE

From the DCU to the lights Jacuzzi use a 10-wire ribbon cable, in which the wires are paired cleverly to mean the connector can be inserted either way up and still work.

PIN      LED
1 & 10   15VDC +
2 & 9    WHITE
3 & 8    RED
4 & 7    GREEN
5 & 6    BLUE

So it was ultimately very trivial to fix.  I bought a cheap wide-voltage-range RGBW LED controller from AliExpress and cut into the lighting wires at the old control box end.  Wired the appropriate wires into the controller and switched it on.  Worked first time.

Also worth noting that while the original Jacuzzi system ran 15VDC the LEDs work just fine on 12VDC with acceptable light output.  There are no white LEDs in the original Jacuzzi in-tub lighting so this ends up unused - except for the Bonus item below.

Bonus:

This tub has a light-up logo on the front which originally was used to identify fault conditions, it can glow White or Red depending on Normal/Fault.  I've yet to work out if I can get this fault logic to work with the Balboa system, but for now I just hard-wired it to glow white when the rest of the LEDs are on.  The logo cable is different and is wired as follows:

Wire     LED
Red      RED
Black    15 VDC+
Brown	 N/C
Green    N/C
White    WHITE

 

[skyhenge]

After switching its control system, I had a similar problem with my hot tub's lights. Figuring out that these LED boxes (DCUs) usually need a small amount of power, like 12V or 24V, helped a lot. Also, they work with a particular signal to change colours and stuff. It's tricky since every company makes their stuff a little different, but if you're willing to play around with it, you can make it work.

I found constructive tips on a website all about LED lights. This site, https://leds.to/ , had an article explaining all about the signals and the power you need for the lights.