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DMX signal problems


jdboyl72

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I am all of a sudden having problems with my lighting rig. The problem lies with my 6 chauvet par 38-18 led cans. Last night I could not get them all to come on at the same time. I would be missing 2, power down, reset and be missing another 1 or 2. Eventually I got control of 5 of the 6 fixtures and just went with it. Today I did a bunch of trial and error I think I discovered the problem. The one light that I could not get on works fine when plugged into the controller by itself; however, when you plug a cable into the dmx out on that fixture, you loose all control the fixure and it will not work. The other 5 appear to be fine. If I put the bad unit last in the chain in dmx mode without anything plugged into the dmx outlet, it also works fine, but that would create a hassle to set the system up that way.

 

Does anybody have any clue as to what is going on? I have 4 days left on my return policy for that unit, but it's strange because the unit works fine by itself?

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I know exactly what your talking about. I have not one, but two colorstrips that are intermittently doing the same thing. I sent one of them back to Chauvet, and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. Again, the second unit sarted doing the same thing. I believe it's probably a cold solder joint from the way it's acting. Both of them are out of warrenty, so I'm inclined to open them up and touch up the connectionsto see if that doesn't help. In the meantime, I've decided to go completely DMX wireless (there's a receiver on each lighting tree), so there's no need to use the DMX outs (I know, that's a cop out). I also save tons of time with set - up.

 

You just have to love that happening to you when you're on the job and nothing want to work. You spend an hour troubleshooting and feel like banging your head against the wall because nothing seems to work.

T. Blake

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After spending most of a year constantly troubleshooting and retroubleshooting the chinese junk LED's I bought over the internet, I know the following:

Dip switches get bumped. Anything down stream of a fixture with a dip switch out of place usually doesn't work.

Power on your controller, then each light or set of light in order from upstream to downstream. The lights do weird things if powered up in the wrong sequence.

 

If you get intermittent faults, it is probably a cold solder joint, or a multi-wire plug in the fixture. If the XLR plugs are surface mounted and soldered to a PC board, they are usually the culprits: the solder gets flexed and breaks. I have found partially and fully detached solder joints, connections that should have been soldered but were not, and intermittent faults due to cable connectors that are loose on the male plug they plug into, or have wires loose connecting to the conductors in the plug.

 

If your fixtures act fine with no music but weird with loud music, even with the dip switches set correctly, it could be the 'sound activation' is working anyway. I actually had to desolder the surface mount mics on three of four lights I bought from one source because the three blinked, changed colors, and strobed if loud music was present, yet acted fine in a quiet environment. The one light that DID work right had no mic in it!

 

Any of the lights I have worked with have power supplies and are low voltage down stream of the power supply, so you can open them up and wiggle stuff to find the problem.

 

Good Luck!!!

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