Shoebox Dimmers

[nealgrover]

I finally had a chance to test my portable side light trees now that I’ve built 2 adapter cords female stage pin/Bates to male Edison to plug into chauvetdj DMX4 shoebox. I bought all this gear “used like new”

after fiddling around getting no results I tested zero volts at the shoebox outlets.
all 4 fuses were blown…. One was just glass bits and I had to dig the ends out with a dental probe. I suggest checking them FIRST no matter what else may be going on. The shoebox was a store demo from Sweetwater Sound in Ft Wayne. the Source4’s work fine just plugged into the wall sockets in my home workshop. YMMV of course.

 

[Chase P.]

Over here in the UK Anytronics have a good reputation for being affordable and rugged.

Beefing up the triac and making sure the fuse is going to blow fast enough to protect the triac, rather than the other way around, is probably the lowest cost option. Most of these smaller units use the common or garden BTAn-600 range of triacs where n is the current rating. A 12A 600V triac here in the UK is £2.50, which as replacement parts go is about as cheap as they come.

Many of the packs I’ve worked with have the fuse upstream of the triac, ensuring failure and future sales. Thankfully they’re usually easy enough to replace, but really?!

My first internet screen name was deadtriac.

 

[FMEng]

Many of the packs I’ve worked with have the fuse upstream of the triac, ensuring failure and future sales. Thankfully they’re usually easy enough to replace, but really?!

My first internet screen name was deadtriac.

The fuse is in series with the triac and the load. It's protecting the same things in either location.

 

[danhr]

Just my 2c, we have 24 elation packs that have been in nearly continuous use (until last march...) for over 8 years, 3 weeks a month with I believe 4 or 5 triac failures which take me 10 minutes to fix. Hope to get them back to work soon....

 

[brucek]

It's hard to take NSI too seriously when they had their own, proprietary control protocol, making DMX an add on option. There are a lot of threads here about NSI problems. Leviton doesn't seem to have made any improvements.

Back to the original question. Reliability takes more expensive components, larger heat sinks, and better design. That costs more, so you get what you pay for.

What was proprietary? Microplex was/is a common protocol used by NSI, Leprecon, Lightronics, to name a few. good for 128 ch. It's the same as ETA's Ultraplex, or Sunn's Sunnplex, but they were limited to 32 (then 64?) channels.

As for why the DMX was an option, well the MPX could power their smaller format boards, where as DMX requires an external PSU (and local power). The option contains a connector wired to a molex header, a MAX485 receiver chip, and a PSU. The $35 or so in parts is a big default option to include in a low cost simple format controller that's only a few hundred dollars to start off with. Don't you think?
Bruce