So we suffered a lightning hit that seems to have nailed our DMX line between the booth and the rack. As a result it shotgunned nearly everything on the DMX run. Part of that was our retrofitted Sensor Classic rack. The CEM3 was throwing a config error, but failed at restoring the bad config on the backplane. Having a lot of experience diving into the classic racks, I was surprised to learn the backplane did much of anything, let alone store a config.
Anyway, after some back and forth it became evident that the backplane was in fact a victim and spared the CEM itself from further damage. Installing a replacement fixed all of our problems and we have since abandoned the under-slab DMX run as it is the second time we have suffered a lightning hit and it definitively confirmed for us that it is a favorite spot for lightning to go.
No real question, but I wanted to share because I thought it was pretty interesting that there's so much going on in the backplane now. There's a flash memory chip right next to the DMX line that suffered the hit. The other chips appear to be some kinds of microprocessors, I'm guessing for handling the ethernet port and maybe even the DMX ports too? One symptom was the CEM would not take any DMX input, but we were able to talk over sACN via the front port.
Anyway, after some back and forth it became evident that the backplane was in fact a victim and spared the CEM itself from further damage. Installing a replacement fixed all of our problems and we have since abandoned the under-slab DMX run as it is the second time we have suffered a lightning hit and it definitively confirmed for us that it is a favorite spot for lightning to go.
No real question, but I wanted to share because I thought it was pretty interesting that there's so much going on in the backplane now. There's a flash memory chip right next to the DMX line that suffered the hit. The other chips appear to be some kinds of microprocessors, I'm guessing for handling the ethernet port and maybe even the DMX ports too? One symptom was the CEM would not take any DMX input, but we were able to talk over sACN via the front port.