Control/Dimming Obsession 2 Hiccup

[Ross]

Here's a riddle:

Yesterday in preshow at 5 minutes to curtain, the faceplate half of my OB2 rebooted itself. The processor did not, just the physical board. Nothing on stage was effected, thankfully, considering the house lights were under board control and people tend to fall a lot in this theatre even with the lights up.

First thing I checked was if the power cord shook loose...nope, or not noticeably
.
Not likely to be a power surge as the faceplate and the processor are plugged into the same power conditioner and again, the processor never seemed to lose power.

At this point, the board rebooted successfully as it would normally on startup; I logged in, and it resumed in the appropriate cue with effects running. Neither conventionals or automation was altered. The error did not occur again.

And here I am the next day and I can't for the life of me recreate the event short of pulling the power cable out myself. As a safeguard, I've changed out the power cable into the board and checked the voltage of the power conditioner and all seems normal.

Anybody have any additional thoughts? All I can think of still to try is to open the board up and make sure that all of the wires leading to the power supply have a good connection and maybe have some contact cleaner on hand.

Oh, and it's been awhile since I've posted. Missed this place!

 

[FMEng]

With no evidence to go on there are many possible causes. Any chance there was a cell phone or two way radio in close proximity to the console at the time?

Don't put too much faith in so called power conditioners. Most of them do little more than provide a bit of surge voltage clamping and a little noise filtering. A variety of power problems can sneak through them. Even a UPS, if it is not of the double conversion, true-online type is not full proof protection.

 

[Ross]

That's a thought. I spent 2 hours trying to recreate the problem this morning, maybe tomorrow I'll try the cell phones and radios.