Hello and Help Needed

[Flora]

I spend my summers designing lights for an outdoor Shakespeare festival. It's a pretty simple set-up, 24 dimmers controlled by an ancient 2-scene preset board. My issue is this: everything works fine as long as the system is in stasis, but as soon as I move an submaster on the board, that channel will wink out or flicker. This happens on individual submasters for individual channels, but for multiple channels on the grand master (the board also has the capability for programming 18 cues -- the problem persists on those cue masters).

Thinking it was a problem with the board, I ordered a DMX/USB box from ENTTEC, and using miniStageConsole (on my PowerPC mac G4) to program cues, I rewrote the show and tried to run it. The problem persists with programmed crossfades, so it probably wasn't only a problem with the board. However, while I was playing around with the set-up, looking for problems, I discovered this: each channel flickers at 50%. Not 49%, not 51%, just 50%. There may be other intensities that coincide with (cause?) the flickering, but I wasn't able to identify them.

Here's what I'm wondering:
1) I'm not currently using a DMX terminator on the DMX USB Pro. Could using one solve the problem? I'm not really familiar with termination or the issues caused by the lack thereof.
2) Has anyone else ever had a problem with dimmer disruption at a certain intensity?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, I'm sort of at a loss.

Thanks,
Flora

 

[gafflover87]

Ive had a similar problem in the past. My problem has always been related to the dimmers themselves. They tend to go out after a while. Not sure if this is your problem, but its worth looking into. One sign that the dimmers are going bad is one or more channels are ghosting. However i've never had the flickering on a specific intensity. Hope this helps!