Weird DMX issues... Vision Net the culprit?

[gafftaper]

As I previously discussed here back in July I got a set of New Chauvet Ovation B-28050 FC LED Cyc lights. In order to prepare for their arrival I got a little deeper into my network than usual. With the help of our friends from Pathway here, I used Pathport Manager to reconfigure my network a bit. I upgraded the firmware in my nodes as long as I was in there and reset some of the nodes to different universes in order to better distribute DMX data around the theater more evenly. Everything worked great or so I thought, then we started noticing some really weird fades on my Seachangers.

About the same time as the reconfiguration we started to notice that once in a while one of the Seachangers would randomly fade to another color. Then we didn't notice it for a while, Not sure if it went away or if it was just so subtle no one noticed. I have the Seachangers setup as a blotchy overlapping gobo texture wash of the stage so if one changes color you might not see it if there's a lot of other lights turned on or other color onstage. But recently we started to notice again and once you notice it drives you crazy, so now I'm hard at work trying to figure out what's wrong.

Layout:
In each of my box boom locations I have an ETC Revolution and 5 Source Fours with Seachanger XG's. In my moving things around I reconfigured these to from Universe 2 to Universe 3 and reset the DMX addresses and patch as appropriate. Everything works great with the Revolutions and I thought everything was great for the Seachangers for a while as they do turn on to the appropriate color you program them on the light board. The 10 Seachangers are in two groups on opposite sides of the house. Each group of 5 is daisy chained, using proper 5 pin DMX cables, and comes from a separate Pathway Uno node, via an ETC revolution (which works normally), and then onto the Seachangers. Each daisy chain is also properly terminated. Nothing has changed about this configuration in years. I have tested this with and without the revolutions and there was no difference, so the fade is not being caused by my Revolutions. I have a set of 12 K9 lights Bulldog 2's (the Chinese LED house brand my local dealer sells). The Bulldogs are assigned just above the Seachangers in the same DMX universe and they are working normally so it's not a universe wide issue.

All 10 Seachangers appear to be in a random fade routine. They wait for between 10 seconds to around 2 minutes and then they take a little less than 3 seconds to fade to a random color before going back to what they are supposed to be doing. I pulled the lamp cap and looked through and it appears they are just going from zero to full and back out on each of the four color wheels, again at random. If they are set for white, the fade to say Cyan then back to white. If they are set to red, the fade to say yellow and back to red. They all do different colors in different random delays. So here's the really fun part, even if I turn off the light board (Strand Palette VL) and reboot the Seachangers they keep doing the fade thing. The only thing that seems to stop them from doing the fade is to unplugging the DMX line. So something else is dumping this Home command into my DMX stream.

I contacted Seachanger and the tech support person said it sounds like they are getting what they call a home command of Cyan 255-Yellow 255-Magenta 255-XGreen 0. How does that happen when the light board is turned off?

The only other thing I can think of is my Strand Vision Net system is doing something strange As it's always online Perhaps there is something in its software sending out 255's to parts of Universe 3 which I just never encountered before. So it seems like my next step is to try to reprogram the Strand Vision Net system... wish I had a copy of the installed software as that would sure make things easy.

@Rob and @VRommel can you think of anyway this could be related to my updating the Uno firmware and moving Unos to different universes? or anything like that?

Does anyone have any great ideas on how to figure this one out? Is anyone experience with messing around with a Vision Net panel you don't have the original software for? Advice on how to begin? Can I download the installed Vision Net Files, edit them and then put them back?

Any other thoughts or ideas to try?

Thanks!

 

[Mac Hosehead]

Vision.net is not directly connected to ethernet so it is tough to see how it would be affecting universe 3.

Vision.net is usually programmed with a serial interface station. Do you see one in your system?

The Pathway folks might have more suggestions.

EDIT:

I don't think I was very concise in what I said originally. Vision.net can use the ethernet for certain functionality but has no provision for directly changing a DMX value over ethernet such as with sACN or Strand's netslots.

The Vision.net configuration software can be downloaded from Strand.

 

[gafftaper]

Mac Hosehead, I know it can change dmx values because it controls my house lights, can change the color of the LED architectural lights on my walls, and even has a set of rehearsal scenes that can be used to capture an active lighting look created on the console and then play it back. So it definitely has bi-directional communication with the rest of the Shownet Network. It also controls a a variety of Non-dims and work light switches. If one of the many pre-recorded scenes was kicking out data to universe three, that could easily be the problem.

When I open my Stage Manager's panel, the back side of the touch screen appears to be a very small windows PC with a small circuit board attached to the back. I'm guessing the circuit board is the I/O interface for whatever the PC speaks natively and Shownet. There appears to be USB ports, Ethernet ports, and serial ports on the mini-PC so I'm not sure which is the correct way to connect. I vaguely remember someone saying you program the file on a computer then load it on a USB drive and boot from it or something like that to install. But I'm not sure if that was for a Vision Net device or another system. Time to go study the Strand site.

 

[Rob]

Check that RDM background discovery is not turned on on your UNOs. I don't know why they would go into recall on discovery but I do know that the Seachangers were early version RDM units.

Is it possible that they may have a flaky power supply and are browning out? Bad pin 1 or 4?

Is ShowNet the only protocol the UNOs are set to receive? We don't have a ShowNet network viewer but you can use Pathscape to watch Pathport protocol. Or put a DMXtr flicker finder on the end of the line to see if any changes are indeed coming from the control system.

 

[Mac Hosehead]

It is my understanding that Vision.net can output DMX with an interface but puts it over the network through a node. It would be possible for a node to be configured for the data to be on universe 3.

 

[ChrisB_SanDiego]

Is there any way you can reinstall the previous firmware to see if this new firmware on the nodes is the culprit?

Try a fresh download of the current firmware in case the one you installed was corrupted.

Also double check that everything is the same protocol and protocol revision.

It might also be worth rechecking the network addresses to make sure all devices are unique.

 

[gafftaper]

Following @Rob's suggestion I opened up my network settings with Pathscape and I've got a bunch of connection error messages popping up. So I'm thinking the problem may be in Uno land. So I'll be contacting Pathway directly for more support. I think everyone's about to go home there. So, I'll report back on what we find tomorrow. Thanks everyone. I love/hate these sorts of deep mysteries.

 

[gafftaper]

I emailed tech support and Brain from Pathway called back quickly in response to my emails and talked me through the situation. We reset the Uno's to factory default, then turned off everything except shownet, turned off RDM, and set them to stay on continuously if there's a loss of DMX (in case it was a weak DMX issue). I'm not sure which item did the trick but everything is working great now. So thanks @Rob and Brian from Pathway for the help!