Help - only 5 controllers out of 14 working

[chewinggum2]

Before you ask, I have an advanced license.  All 14 controllers worked fine last year except for #5 - this one i had to use phone cable with as the port was loose.  Now controllers 1-4 and 12 work.  All the others have blinking red lights.  I don't know what generation controllers I have, and I use an Mp3 director to power my display.  I have never hooked a computer up to it.  If controller 5 is bad, would that make the others go dark - and if so, why would 12 still work??  I am a technically challenged female so I've read tons of posts about pins and other such stuff and I just don't understand it.  

 

Thanks,

Robin

[dgrant]

Most likely, you have a bad cable connection or a bad cable itself. Now I only have Gen 3 controllers, so I don't know about earlier ones yet although I'm picking up two Gen 2's tomorrow. The Gen 3's connect with CAT5/6 cable and dasiy chain out to each other. Its possible to have a bad connection along the path from your director to the controllers and between controllers. Figure out which ID is laid in the sequence of the cables and identify where things are working and where they stop working. Between those two is where it probably is. Now on the Gen 3's again, we don't use the phone connection at all and in fact, I don't know what its for but we use the RJ45 connectors which is the larger Cat5/6 cables. Trying to use a 4-pin phone cable will not function in those RJ45 connectors.

[Jeff Messer]

If one of the 45's is bad use a splitter on the other good one to daisy chain them. A bad cat 5 will hide controllers on the network. Took me three days to find my bad cable and it was the first one from the computer to the first LOR box.  Unplug one at a time till you find the bad one.  I used a 45 connector to speed this up but I did have 26 LOR boxes in this years show.

 

Jeff