LEDs and R20 reassurance

[liamskneeson]

High School Theater teacher here (self taught on all things lighting)

I have set up our Colorsource LED lights and I really want to make sure I did it correctly, so I'm looking for some reassurance. The amount of anxiety I have that I'm going to ruin $30,000 worth of ETC color source pars 2 weeks before our musical is unreal, ha.

I have 9 colorsource pars daisy chained to a wireless color source relay, the color source relay is plugged into a dimmer with a r20 module (etc unison system). I've repeated this same thing for 3 different electrics (9 cs pars to cs relay powered by R20 module, so 1 module per electric)

From there I've parked the r20 channels at full and everything seems to be working well. I did however read this article from ETC and I'm wondering if I have to set the r20's to non-dim? Or is that only if I was using d20's to power the LEDS? (which I'm not)

Is there anything I'm missing? Like I said, it appears to be working but I'm programming cues tomorrow and I have a ton of anxiety that I'm going to ruin all of our LED lights, ha.

 

[Ford]

Hi Liam,
There are people who are more expert on the ETC Systems than I am on this forum, but here is what I know.
A dimmer modifies the waveform. Even a dimmer parked at full. A relay does not...it's simply a controllable switch.

Your fixtures need a pure sinewave, or the electronics will (eventually) be damaged. You might not see a problem right away, but eventually the PSU or processor will fail.

So, if the R20 can act as a true relay, and is set to non-Dim mode, it should be OK.
HOWEVER, if it is still just being a dimmer "set to full", it is likely to eventually damage your fixtures.
I believe that ETC offers Relay modules for the Unison racks. The only Unison system that I used had a GE relay panel controlled by the Unison brain, so we didn't have that issue.

@STEVETERRY can you hop in and help here?

 

[Colin]

The "R" in R20 stands for Relay. It's just a fancy switch, not a dimmer, and you won't harm the fixtures. It's sort of redundant though to have the CS Relay powered by the R20, since the R20 is made to be remotely switched. So keep in mind that you probably have a lot of possibilities for reconfiguration and expansion if you have both CS Relays and R20s in stock. Like if you need to add light from a new/improvised position then you can use a CS Relay plugged into any "regular outlet" in a room, and you can still keep the R20s to power other positions; you just have to figure out the data runs separately, and program a startup/shutdown macro on your console to switch the R20 power on/off automatically.

 

[derekleffew]

From there I've parked the r20 channels at full and everything seems to be working well. I did however read this article from ETC and I'm wondering if I have to set the r20's to non-dim? Or is that only if I was using d20's to power the LEDS? (which I'm not)

You don't HAVE to set the slot as non-dim as the R20 can only output Zero or Full voltage, but it doesn't hurt and might be nice to identify the slot on the CEM. If available, "switched" is preferable to "non-dim." At the console, it might be helpful to assign a profile "Full at 1%" to the dimmer channel in question.
So you've now told the slot at least three times to only output 0-100%. In theory with these settings even a dimming module D20 would act just like an R20, WHEN USED WITH ETC FIXTURES, as per the PDF you attached. Now some of these steps are left over from when we didn't have R20 modules, but nothing bad will happen by telling a slot to act as a non-dim from two different places; it's not like the settings cancel each other out.

Sounds like you're doing fine. The only thing I question, like @Colin above, is the relay feeding a relay situation, but it's not unsafe, just overly-redundant, again.