ryebred Posted December 16, 2014 Share Posted December 16, 2014 I have two DC controllers and one CTBPC16 controller that I have had for five years now and I am getting intermittent problems this year where channels are getting stuck on in the middle of a sequence. What seems to be happening is the lights sometimes freeze in whatever state they are in and remain that way for around 10 seconds before finally going back to behaving normally. Two of the controllers are indoors and not exposed to the elements at all and one is outdoors. I tried powering them off and then back on again but that doesn't really seem to fix it. I have checked all my sequences and run the verifier on everything and there are no conflicts so this has to be some sort of hardware issue. However it seems really odd that three controllers would all be affected by this at the same time. I added a bunch more pixels to the display this year so I started thinking it might be lag but the problem does not seem to occur on the other five LOR controllers nor on the pixel controllers. Any ideas and help on what is going on and what I can do to fix the issue would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Hans Posted December 16, 2014 Share Posted December 16, 2014 Could be a cat 5 issue. Try switching them out. Also, do you have one of your cat 5 cables running on top of a power cable? This too can cause some funky results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George Simmons Posted December 16, 2014 Share Posted December 16, 2014 You added "a bunch more pixels" this year ... Define "a bunch". How many exactly? How many networks are you running? Without knowing more, it sounds like you've got a network issue - not a controller issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryebred Posted December 16, 2014 Author Share Posted December 16, 2014 I had 3,500 channels last year and I have 4,300 something this year. The controllers that are having issues are the first three that are connected to the LOR dongle. If it was a network issue I would have expected lights on controllers further downstream to have issues as well though those controllers are only 3 years old compared to 5 years for the troublesome ones. And the cat5 lines do not run near the power lines other then when they pass by the CTB16 dongles to enter the case and plug into the board. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max-Paul Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Almost sounds like a signal reflection in the Cat 5 cable from the last controller bouncing back to the first controllers. Try adding a 110 or 120 ohm resistor on pins 4 & 5 and plug this stub plug into the last controller. Not something that always has to be done, but in some cases it is. If you where to read the white pages for RS-485. You would find where they tell you that this is something that really should not be over looked. It is simple and cheap. give it a try and see if that wont clear up your problems. I have seen others swear by them to clear up their problems. This sounds like a possible candidate for the fix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darryl Lambert Posted December 21, 2014 Share Posted December 21, 2014 (edited) I think Max-Paul is correct. I've had this issue & no matter what I did, swapping cat5/controllers,buying shielded cable, fixed it. It wasn't until I put terminators / resistors at the beginning & end of that particular chain that my problems went awayAs a side note this only happened on my DC cards. My 10 LOR AC controllers do not have terminators on them to this day. I believe it's been mentioned before that it's probably the DC power supplies introducing noise that is the real culprit Edited December 21, 2014 by Darryl Lambert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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