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Strange channel behaviour


seamanrob2

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Ive dusted off the 2 LOR 16 channel units I have and set them up for Christmas.

Running through the hardware program, I noted that after a while, one of my rope light trees began to flicker. After five minutes it went out and the channel is behaving really weird now. Its on controller 02, but if I activate it, it stays dead, but all the channels on controller 01 light up.

Has anyone else had this before?

Baffling me.

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I had a channel do that when I fired up a used controller I purchased. It ended up being a fried bug on the board. There was serious damage to the board in my case.

LED lighting can cause some strange behavior. Any chance it’s LED rope light?

Also, you said all the channels on controller 01 light up. Do the other channels on controller 02 work at this point?

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Try hooking up #2 exactly the same as #1, but only use one controller at a time. Verify 1 works perfectly, then switch it out with 2 and eliminate many possible issues.

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Not sure if its an LED rope light or incandescent to be honest. Its a few years old now.

We had a hell of a lot of rain last night and the controller on the ropelight was buzzing strangely before it went out, so I'm guessing the IP44 rating may not be up to much.

Right at this moment I am unable to do much about it because I work weird shifts, but I will attempt to fault find next week when Im home again.

All the other channels on board 02 working fine (with the exception of one of the triacs that stays on low instead of reverting to off, but this was an issue last year as well).

To be honest, all this has gone out the window since last night after I had a fox attack all the wiring on the ground. Fortunately for the fox, alas not for me, the house breakers tripped. Anyone know any good ways to get rid of foxes that does not involve the use of a gun (since I can't get hold of one in the UK)! Im spitting feathers right now.

Anyway, in the meantime I will continue to programme the sequence without the rope tree light in it and hope for a solution next week!

Thanks for the input.

Regards

Rob

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Sorry, forgot to mention to rwertz,

Yes, all the other channels on board 2 are fine (just one triac issue but its no biggie). Its just this one channel on board 2 thats controlling all the channels on board 1!

My other half is set to do some investigations while im away.

Regards

Rob

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Rob, that buzzing sound coming from controller 2(?) isn’t natural. It probably means something got damaged in there.

I finally understand that the command sent to the bad channel on controller 2 is taking effect on all the channels on controller 1. I doubt that damage to just controller 2 could easily cause that. Maybe when things went wrong some higher voltages got on the communication cables and damaged them.

You might want to remove controller 2 and see if the command sent to the bad channel on controller 2 still effects controller 1. If it does, then you’re problem is more than controller 2. Hopefully it’s just a bad CAT5 cable or connection.

If the problem with controller 1 goes away when controller 2 is removed, then I guessing either controller 2 is really messed up or it’s the CAT 5 cable connecting controller 2.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi again,

To keep you all updated!

Rwertz, the buzzing was coming from the rope light independent controller, and I guess it messed with the LOR system. It had died completely, and whenever it remained plugged into LOR controller 2, somehow, and im at a loss to explain how, whenever its LOR channel was powered up, it turned on all the lights on LOR controller 1. So there was some weird behaviour going on.

Thats sorted now (new static rope light).

In the meantime, my friendly neighbourhood fox decided to chew through several cables attached to LOR one. The result was a ceramic fuse had blown. Replaced and back online.

Except now more issues with triacs! I swear this year everything has been set against us doing a light show. But no biggie with triacs. I'll just have to send them away for repair at the end of the season.

Regards

Rob

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