House dimmer programming

[Jay Ashworth]

Can anyone tell me what sort of dimmer controllers these are and how one reprograms them?

They drive our 4 channels of house lights, and the DMX channels they talk to seem to be jumping around occasionally (it has happened twice now, contemporaneously with some house relamping we didn't do.)

 

[Jay Ashworth]

 

[Jay Ashworth]

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Our current situation is, specifically, that the four fader box upstairs in the booth works as expected, but the downstairs box, while it will take over and leave all the lights lit and turn them off, only turns on our two center section dimmers, leaving our front row dimmer and our wing lights dimmer off.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

PCB in downstairs box:

 

[Jay Ashworth]

House dimmers EDI:

 

[JD]

Circuit board says it's NSI
I would parse through their "discontinued" products and look for a visual match.

Here's a more modern one:
http://www.leviton.com/OA_HTML/SectionDisplay.jsp?section=37942&minisite=10251

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Should I expect DMX you think? House dimmers do appear on board and DMX cabling direct into that box.

 

[JD]

Should I expect DMX you think? House dimmers do appear on board and DMX cabling direct into that box.

Since the dimmers were EDI, I think we can rule out Microplex, and I don't think it is analog.... Although a little research on the EDI system might clear that up as some of these systems did allow for analog input which would take priority over the DMX input. Since the cabling is DMX, I think I would figure on 90% chance that it is a DMX override.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

The odd thing is that the takeover box which used to turn all four channels to 100 now only turns two, and possibly only one because... Well it's too complicated to explain. The question is: is the selection of channels which the takeover button takes over selected in the takeover button? Or is it selected in the 4 channel control panel?

 

[Jay Ashworth]

All of the cabling, for the record, appears to be 18 to 22 gauge twisted pair thermostat wire, 4 pair. It was not the cable I expected to see.

 

[JD]

All of the cabling, for the record, appears to be 18 to 22 gauge twisted pair thermostat wire, 4 pair. It was not the cable I expected to see.

That's strange! The board revision is from 1996 which is almost 20 years back. Hybrid house dimming systems (analog/DMX) were common. The fact that the control is NSI and the dimmer was EDI is a good indicator that the method used was at least common between manufacturers. Unless the EDI has an analog input for houselights override, then at some point the signal has to have an interface that interrupts the DMX from the board. That would be where I started looking. Are all the feeds to the EDI DMX? I would not >think< that they would have used thermostat wire to run DMX, but then again, installers can do some pretty strange things and DMX often tolerates it.
Maybe time for a call to NSI. You may want to peal some of those labels off and see if there is a model number under them. The "TB1" on the board may or may not be a model number.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Ok. now that I'm not on a cellphone in a faraday cage.

The 4+master box is in our booth, with a box that appears to be a power source of some sort mounted on the wall at the end of a pair of cables as mentioned above, presumably for those two controllers; there's a tag cable downstairs to the button takeover box, and then another cable up through a pipe into the ceiling that runs backstage.

There's a DMX-IN jack on a one-gang attached to the side of the dimmer box backstage.

When i first touched the house, 2 years ago, the 4 faders addressed the 4 non-sequential dimmer channels which also appear on our DMX Smartfade. Somewhere along the way, the ch1 and ch2 faders on that box got reprogrammed so that either brings up both channels of the rear-center, leaving the wings and front-row still on separate faders -- this did not affect how they program on the Smartfade.

The downstairs box, with only a button, has always taken over whatever was active, and then taken all 4 to 0 when turned off, bringing them all to 100 when turned back on -- just as you would probably expect.

In this most recent problem, which cropped up after our most recent run in the house, and contemporaneously with some lamps being replaced (a clause which describes the time when the two faders upstairs quit working separately as well), that downstairs button now only turns on from black the paired center-rear channels, leaving the wings and front-row unlit.

Since that's the "non-technical user" control, you can understand why we'd care.

My speculation is that the takeover button's control is programmed by the upstairs, smarter, fader box, and that it has lost part of it's mind, twice. We couldn't easily get it unshipped from its 4-gang box, so it remains unclear how you program it -- but the DMX-In jack for the Smarfade *is attached to that box* -- the wire runs from one box to the other, immediately adjacent.

So I'd be hard pressed to say it's not all DMX.

The house was built from scratch in 2000, so it's not all that ancient.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Ok, a little more full-screen googling suggests the thing you can't read on the downstairs panel calls this Leviton Remembrance gear:

http://www.stagelightingstore.com/Leviton-Remembrance-DMX-Station-Master-4-Sliders-Wall-Mount-4-Gang

So lemme see if with that hint I can dig up a manual.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

This appears to be the manual:

http://communities.leviton.com/docs/DOC-1138

And it *appears* to suggest I'm right: the takeover button merely *tells the 4-scene controller to do something specific*. I'm just having a hard time discerning which thing.

One final tidbit: I don't *think* the downstairs button is wired as panic, cause when you hit it, the green power button light in the booth goes out, and vice versa.

 

[JD]

In reading a few pages, it sounds like you set the wall controller to "record" a scene on to each of the sliders using the output from a regular DMX console by setting a jumper on the wall controller and holding down certain buttons for certain amounts of time. In that respect, each slider becomes a preset submaster that can control any number of DMX channels, or just one.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Yeah, that part I had figured out -- and I think it's gotten messed up because someone never reset the jumper after initial install.

What I'm still trying to figure out is what the takeover button downstairs is *supposed to tell the actual dimmer panel in the booth to do*. I think it's set up as Entry, but the manual is pretty silent on how that's supposed to work; I think I'm going to have to pore over the actual diagrams.

 

[JD]

Yeah, that part I had figured out -- and I think it's gotten messed up because someone never reset the jumper after initial install.

What I'm still trying to figure out is what the takeover button downstairs is *supposed to tell the actual dimmer panel in the booth to do*. I think it's set up as Entry, but the manual is pretty silent on how that's supposed to work; I think I'm going to have to pore over the actual diagrams.

Checkout page 20. I think the the takeover switches simply activate whatever settings are set on the mini-controller. They have that T/C buss ( Take Control ?)

 

[Jay Ashworth]

The drawing on p20 is all analog, though, isn't it?

 

[JD]

The drawing on p20 is all analog, though, isn't it?

No, look at the bottom left of page 20. It is DMX in and DMX out. The systems itself runs analog between it's own wall boxes, but it's loop into your main system is DMX.