EDI Dimmer rack problem

cindy

Member
Hi,
I'm new to posting forums so hope I do this right. I'm a TD at my church. We have an EDI MX dimmer rack that has all the theatricals AND house lights for our auditorium. The theatricals are controlled by a Bijou Console and the house lights are controlled by a Smart System with a Master Station and 3 10 button stations in different parts of the auditorium. Something happened, maybe a power hit we did have one last Friday. When I came in last night I was told by our facilities manager he was trying to figure out why an entire bank of house lights was out and in fooling around with the stuff, now all the lights are mixed up. House lights are on the Bijou and Theatricals are on the Smart system. I tried everything I could including power cycling the Bijou and the entire dimmer rack. I took the control module out of the dimmer rack and cleared the memory, also reset the processor, also changed the battery for the memory. I tried re-programming the Smart System, took the Bijou back to factory presets and repatched everythiing. In the end I was able to get it usable for our weekend services, BUT the Smartfade stations are still bringing up the theatricals, on the Bijou and none of the house lights. The house lights wound up on the Bijou. They've never been there before. We are about to replace the Bijou with an ETC Element but I'd like to get the dimmers back to normal first. Any ideas?? The old line diagrams say DMX 1 from the dimmers goes to the Bijou, and DMX 2 goes to the Smart System.

thanks
 
I suspect this best may be able to be solved with a conference call between:
1. yourself (Eastern time) at the dimmer rack,
2. EDI Service and Repair
Alan Child
Phone 503-781-7361 (Pacific time)
[email protected]
Electronics Diversified equipment, and
3. ETC Service 1-800-688-4116 (Central time).

Good luck. It's always problematic when more than one manufacturer is involved, but not insurmountable.
 
I suspect this best may be able to be solved with a conference call between:
1. yourself (Eastern time) at the dimmer rack,
2. EDI Service and Repair
Alan Child
Phone 503-781-7361 (Pacific time)
[email protected]
Electronics Diversified equipment, and
3. ETC Service 1-800-688-4116 (Central time).

Good luck. It's always problematic when more than one manufacturer is involved, but not insurmountable.

I'm not sure why ETC needs to be included since the install currently has no ETC equipment.
 
I'm not sure why ETC needs to be included since the install currently has no ETC equipment.
OP said "Smart System" which I took to mean ETC SmartLink architectural controls. I was wrong. Smart System is/was EDI's arch control. So Alan Child should be able solely to get you back where you were.
 
Thanks, I've emailed Alan since I'm not physically at the church today. We don't have any ETC equipment yet. Yes the smart system is the archtechtural control for the house lights. Since the old drawings have one DMX line coming from the Bijou for the stage lights, and a 2nd DMX line coming from the smart system for the house lights, I'm thinking I need to use the remote keypad that plugs into the control module via CAT 5 to reassign which dimmers are on which DMX. Just couldn't get it to do it last night with the manuals instructions. Does anyone have any experience doing that?
 
It's really unlikely that the Bijou and the Smart System both suddenly started transmitting the opposite information at the same time. So I'm thinking either something happened in the software at the rack and it is confused about DMX 1 and 2 or... more likely in a church, someone was messing around with something they didn't know about and physically switched the DMX 1 and 2 lines where they connect to the rack. Are they easily accessible? Try switching them. Or is there somewhere along the way that the two lines meet up before running to the rack that they could be switched at. It just seems like the most likely problem is a well meaning church member trying to help and switching cables, or an unsupervised 12 year old wondering what these are for.
 
It's really unlikely that the Bijou and the Smart System both suddenly started transmitting the opposite information at the same time. So I'm thinking either something happened in the software at the rack and it is confused about DMX 1 and 2 or... more likely in a church, someone was messing around with something they didn't know about and physically switched the DMX 1 and 2 lines where they connect to the rack. Are they easily accessible? Try switching them. Or is there somewhere along the way that the two lines meet up before running to the rack that they could be switched at. It just seems like the most likely problem is a well meaning church member trying to help and switching cables, or an unsupervised 12 year old wondering what these are for.
Ha! Yes, we have many precocious pre-teens and well meaning church members! I'm pretty sure no one except The building maintenance supervisor was messing around with it while trying to troubleshoot an entire section of house lights that was out. I doubt he switched the DMXs but who knows. I will check on that and ask him again what exactly he did when I'm down there this weekend. It was actually worse than just the two DMXs being switched to start with. I was able to get it back to a usable condition by getting all the stage and house liights on the Bijou. Problem now is only stage lights show up on the architectural controls, no house lights.
 
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Ahh... so if you got everything working on the Bijou then that isn't the problem.
 
Hi we have a similar issue our drama department doesn't know what they did to our board but some who all the lights on ch 1-48 got move to the second lighting row on our boards and we had to find every light that once work to have our spring band concert And to everyone's knowledge our stage light and everything never really fully functioned correctly? Can anyone help?
 

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