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Large groups of channels misbehave with iDMX1000


kslagerman

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Hello,

LOR v3.8.0

Hoping someone might be able to assist. We are producing a fairly large scale production for the holidays and are using an iDMX1000 with current firmware but are running into an issue with DMX not passing out of the unit correctly some of the time. We are using almost all 512 channels.

The problem occurs when trying to turn on (at full, 100%) larger groups of channels at the same moment. For example if in a sequence a group of 7 or 8 channels comes on all together, they don't come on or will be delayed by several seconds, or behave sporadically, but if I reduce the number of channels to 3 or 4, they come on fine and behave fine.

I notice a few work ways to avoid this. For example if the group comes on using a fade up, they will all work, OR if I stagger the group by a couple of 10ths of second, it will work.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Our lead tech suggested I inquire about the possibility of changing the DMX transmission speed, but I am not seeing that so not sure if it can be done. Anything else i should check? Im not super savvy with this stuff, so I hope this makes a little sense.

Thanks,

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This might be outdated info- but seeing nobody has replied yet, I'll just share what I learned a year ago - but understand this might not apply anymore. Just trying to help.

A year ago I had a similar problem and the my solution came from two things.

1. Do not have the address of the iDMX ending in 0. I was instructed to have it end with a 1. I don't know why this helped last year but I did it.

2. iDMX transmitted slowly on 512 channels and was more streamlined to work with 256 channels, and seemed to be slow for some reason. It did however kick in to high speed mode once it saw things were being transmitted on channel 257 or higher. But as it was explained to me, there was a buffer situation and it took a while for everything to catch up. So my solution came by sending anything but a 0 to any channel over 256 (I used channel 257 and sent a 1) right at the beginning of the sequence. From that point on, everything worked much better but at high rates of changes on a majority of channels and I could see "misses" of the data still now and then. But overall it was a huge improvement doing these two things.

Again I recognize my limited DMX experience makes my suggestion here questionable, but perhaps worth a try.

Good luck. Jay

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Thanks. That, along with a suggestion from the help desk, was actually very helpful. I changed the unit ID from E0 to E1 and also changed the network speed in the LOR Network Prefs to "Short Range (faster)". It's day time now so I've only done a little prelim testing, but so far it looks like the issue is solved.

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