OK, be very careful with the
ColorTran Innovator series... We have one at a local middle school, and rather often (close to once every show, before, after, or sometimes during) it will lock up, or do something funny, like a slider will stop working, or the display will freeze up, or the whole thing freezes up, and it is often solved by (this is true) giving it a nice hard thump to the left of the trackball on the
console. It sounds truly caveman, but even unplugging and plugging the
console back in doesn't work sometimes. When it froze once, I hit it like I described above, all the FL indicators on the
screen lit up for a quick second, then everything was back to normal.
If these are the same problems that others are experiencing, it may be very possible that the choice of internal
connector (board-to-board) chosen by NSI/
ColorTran for this board is rather faulty and tends to become unseated often.
I haven't taken the board apart to take a look, and since it's the schools, I'm rather apprehensive of doing so. For now, we make sure to have the shelf for the board's
VGA monitor serve dual purpose as beverage holder, so if something spills, "Oooops, I guess we have to get a new one!"
By the way, this school is fairly recently constructed (2001) and is a middle school, and I feel very lucky to work in such an environment, with 2 i96
dimmer racks and this
console, which is much more than many *high schools* have. I went to this middle school a few years ago, where I started in lighting/sound for performances, and have since moved on to the highschool, but I still go back to do shows at the middle school because it has better equipment that the high school does!