Cat5e Cable Broke - Help?

[noynek]

I have one CTB16PC controller which works great, I have tested it and it works just fine with a cat5e cable and the RS485 USB to my laptop and I can run my show, and have for the past 2 years.

​​I have recently built a new house and had the contractor run a single cat5e cable from the outside of my house to the inside. The run of cable is somewhat long (200 ft?), but I am unable to get this cord to work. I come from a technical background and have wired many patch cables in the past, so I re-did both ends and still to no avail.

My theory is that a staple/nail damaged the cable as when running a test with my equipment all wires work except number 3 (white/green) of the 8 wires.

With that being said, I think LOR does not use all 8 wires to communicate. Is there someway to re-wire my cat5e cable to make it work?​​

[Ebuechner]

LOR does not need all of the pairs. The problem comes in if there is a staple in the wire and you have a few wires that aren't working now which ones are compromised and which ones aren't? It may not so bad right now but it could be right around the corner.

[k6ccc]

Likely a good guess on the damaged cable.  200 feet is not an issue for RS-485.  Yes, you are in luck.  LOR only uses pair 1 (wires 4 & 5 - normally the white blue pair).  You can wire a custom cable to support that one pair.  If you are doing something that requires power from a controller to an ELL for example, that is on pair 2 (wires 3 & 6 - normally the white orange pair).  Does not sound like this would be an issue for your setup - nor likely in the future either.  Just for useful information, DMX uses pair 3 (wires 1 & 2 - normally the white green pair).  That's not an issue unless you plan to change to DMX.

[Ebuechner]

So here's the scoop. Lor controllers use pins 4 5 & 6. Pins 4&5 are for data 6 is for ground. Standard cable wiring T - 568 B pins 4 and 5 would be blue and blue stripe. Pin 6 would be green. For a 200 foot run you want to make sure you use the ground wire. So you could make up the cable substituting any colors you want just make sure you use a twisted pair for the data line

[saveglamis]

if you are sure white/green is damaged.  I would rewire your rj45's on each end like such:

pin 1 white/orange

pin 2 orange

pin 3 white/brown

pin 4 white/blue

pin 5 blue

pin 6 brown

pin 7 white/green

pin 8 green

 

pin 7&8 aren't used for anything, wiring it the way I showed above basically just swaps the green and brown pairs.  do it the same way on both ends

[saxon]

while you have the ends off, ohm out each wire. That will tell you for sure which wire or wires are damaged.