Control/Dimming Lehigh DX2 Series Dimmer Cabinet must be reset every time the power goes out...

mspet

Member
My school has a Lehigh (typical, I know) Lighting System. Our dimmer is a
DX2 Series Dimmer Cabinet, which works pretty well for our purposes. Literally three hours ago, I was forced to run lights for a school production off of the dimmer switches in the cabinet because a power outage wiped the ram for the second time in 2 months... It was a nightmare... Anyway, I'm interested in learning how to reprogram the dimmer cabinet myself. Beyond the obvious legal issues (like the fact that I don't own it) is the process all that complicated? The last time it happened, the county brought out the guy who installed it and he fixed it within the hour. However, the process of getting him there took two weeks and I really don't enjoy waiting, especially when there are productions at risk.

Also, isn't there suppose to be some sort of backup battery located within the cabinet to prevent the loss of date during a power outage? I'd like to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.
Thanks,
 
A quick glance through the manual shows that there are some DIP switches that determine whether it boots from ROM or RAM. RAM erases when the power goes away.

When the brains get scrambled once, you could chalk it up to "one of those things." After two times, it means there's a problem that needs to be corrected.

Invite the technician to come back and reprogram it AND determine the cause for the settings to be lost when the power goes away. Upon completion of his work, ask him to cut the power and demonstrate that the rack will properly recover.
 
I am not much help to this question but I just wanted to saw, wow, never seen a dimming system like this. That's pretty cool that you can have basic funtionality and even cues on the rack itself.
 
Thanks! I actually didn't have cues though. It was the most insane night of my technical life. Basically all I had (and still have actually... county techs haven't been out yet) was the switches themselves. Switch up, light up, switch down, light off. There was quite a bit of panicking until the stage manager and I figured out how we were going to alter the lighting for the show (aka cut out SOOOOOO many effects and other nifty things I had programmed in before...). During the show, it was me and another tech frantically flipping switches (using about 60 channels) during scene changes. And since all dimmers are labeled with the same channel number as I'm used to in normal lightboard operation.... you get the idea. It was probably similar to some of the more archaic lighting systems (as in original electric dimmer systems), if a bit more unwieldy...
 
Im not sure I get what really happened, probably because I don't know how Lehigh systems work.

Did the board get wiped? Or did something happen to your rack?

At least your rack has the capability of controlling circuits directly!:p Our i96 (Leviton) rack, like most modern racks are useless without a controller.

Must of been a long night though, what kind of show was it?
 
It was an SCA Talent Show, essentially. Not that hard to light under normal circumstances, mostly just washes of varying intensity, but it was still a major pain to flip everything quickly enough.

What happened is that every time the power goes down during a surge or blackout, the RAM (which requires constant electricity) gets wiped. The resulting problem is that the light board doesn't respond, nor do any of the in house light panels, because the dimmer rack is unable to communicate. Most of the time, this would mean that our auditorium would remain dark until they reprogram it, but the fact that some of the lights were up at the time of the outage meant that we still had control over 2/3rds of the house lights and 1/3rd of the stage lights. However, I could only control the light from the breakers. It was very cumbersome.
 
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