Pixels seem to be receiving commands in 'packets', not smooth

[blbeattie]

I have a Sandevices E682, and have done some testing with "Sacnview" (thanks to Jim St. John) which has established that the E682 is receiving the network signals correctly and passing that on to the pixels. Getting smooth fades and chases across all pixels on the roofline.

 

However, when I run those lights with the Sequence Editor (S3 Advanced, v3.10.14 and 3.11.0), the lights seem to be receiving the signals in "packets". In other words, what should be a simple chase (along a roof line) from left to right will actually 'chase' about 12-15 pixels, pause, continue on to the next 12-15 pixels, pause, and so on. The rest of the display (CCP's, CCR's and 6 CTBPC16's) all behave correctly.

 

So the "sacnview" program Jim directed me to use for testing has proven (as far as I know) that the network and the E682 seem to be working correctly, so this lag or "packets" seem to be an issue with SE.

 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

-Bruce

[plasmadrive]

I don't know enough to fix your problem but I can tell you that I run S3 with two E6804s (8 universes) via a wireless bridge, and one LOR network using ELLs and they all run just fine. 

 

So S3 will do it ok... That doesn't help with your problem, but it does tell you that it will work if the stars all line up correctly...

 

I assume you have your visualizer and other things in S3 that eat up display bandwidth turn off...

[tbetgeorge]

I have a Sandevices E682, and have done some testing with "Sacnview" (thanks to Jim St. John) which has established that the E682 is receiving the network signals correctly and passing that on to the pixels. Getting smooth fades and chases across all pixels on the roofline.

 

However, when I run those lights with the Sequence Editor (S3 Advanced, v3.10.14 and 3.11.0), the lights seem to be receiving the signals in "packets". In other words, what should be a simple chase (along a roof line) from left to right will actually 'chase' about 12-15 pixels, pause, continue on to the next 12-15 pixels, pause, and so on. The rest of the display (CCP's, CCR's and 6 CTBPC16's) all behave correctly.

 

So the "sacnview" program Jim directed me to use for testing has proven (as far as I know) that the network and the E682 seem to be working correctly, so this lag or "packets" seem to be an issue with SE.

 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

-Bruce

This is exactly what I'm trying to fix too but with Nutcracker. It works for like 2 seconds, pauses, then resumes. I am running 2811 chip strings on a E682. Even if I run just one string, it pauses. Going crazy!

 

- Tom

[TonyD]

Is the sandevice on a different network from the rest of your computers? Almost sounds like your computer is struggling to communicate with it and that takes a little extra time. Do you have a firewall or anti-virus program that may be getting in between?

[blbeattie]

Is the sandevice on a different network from the rest of your computers? Almost sounds like your computer is struggling to communicate with it and that takes a little extra time. Do you have a firewall or anti-virus program that may be getting in between?

Tony, I do have this on the same network as the rest of my computers, but Jim St. John (Sandevices) has suggested that if the E682 and pixels respond correctly thru "sacnview", then very likely the problem is not on the network or in the E682.

 

In case anyone is interested, the "sacnview" program can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sacnview/files/latest/download

[plasmadrive]

Tony might have a point.. worst case, connect the e682 directly to the computer with no network and give it a shot.. would eliminate some of the unknowns.

[TonyD]

I'm not familiar with "sacnview" but if it works correctly then maybe something else is wrong. Just out of curiosity, what is the IP and subnet mask on the E682 and your computer? If you open task manager do you see the CPU maxed out or a lot of paging?

 

It seems more likely to me you have something screwy with the network config (perhaps in LOR) that is delaying the communication to the E682. Sorry I don't know enough about how to set these up to tell you what to do but what I suspect is happening is LOR is trying to communicate "down the wrong path" to the E682, waits for a timeout, tries a different path and then succeeds. The delay you're seeing is the timeout before LOR tries a different path.

[n_gifford]

Turn off any wifi adapters on your computer and connect the E682 directly to your computer.  Assuming your sending E1.31 from LOR in multicast, it will do some very strange things over your network.  If I forget to disable my wifi before firing up the LOR Control Panel, it will bring my entire network to its knees in about 3 seconds.

Sorry for the double post, but make sure to remove your computer from the rest of your home network as well.  Should have mentioned that, if it wasn't obvious.......

[blbeattie]

Alright. Everything is working now. Here's how it was resolved.

 

1st of all (and this may be the most important fact), I was running this thru Parallels on my Mac. This is an I7 quad core Mac mini with 16 gb ram. Plenty of horsepower to push everything I have. But again, the lights on the E682 seemed to be receiving (or processing) the data in 'packets'. I can no longer use what used to be my PC show computer (cue funeral dirge). So I booted directly into Bootcamp (again on my Mac mini) and tried running the show thru that. NO PROBLEMS! So it does look like the Parallels VM is 'packeting' the E1.31 data somehow.

 

Bottom line: no E682 problems, no network problems, no computer problems. Problem seems to be in how Parallels is sending out the data.

 

Thanks to everyone for the help and suggestions.

[JonB256]

I noticed that it was about 6 days between first post to resolution. 

 

If you had mentioned that you were running on a Mac first, you might have gotten a faster fix. 

There are enough people running LOR SE on Macs that I hesitate to call them non-standard, but the responses you got were primarily from PC/Windows users (as am I) so they were not going to help much.

 

Glad you got it figured out.

 

I've moved all my LOR SE S3 sequences onto a Falcon Pi Player (running on a Raspberry Pi computer) and merged my LMS files with xLights/Nutcraker data. While it is running well, it is definitely non-standard and wouldn't get much help here.