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Show is behaving erratically all of a sudden?


teedee

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Not sure if this is the correct place to ask for help, but here goes...tonight my show was running fine for the first hour then began behaving erratically.  Leaping arches worked during some songs, stuck during others.  Same with the mini and mega tree.  The show has been running flawlessly for two weeks and I'm not sure where to start checking for problems.  I've had this equipment for several years.  I run only LOR controllers (PC16), nine of them, with 4 ELLs and a G3MP3 director.  I am running LOR 3.3 Advanced, which I know is not the latest but has been working well for me so far. When I noticed the problem, I went out to the controllers and checked inside for the red lights.  The first set had a solid red light and all lights seemed to be working correctly.  The second set also seemed to be working correctly.  When I checked the mega tree boxes, some were blinking and then would turn solid and lights would work.  At the arches/mini trees, the red lights inside were blinking and the lights were not on...then the red light would turn solid and some lights would come on.  I thought that perhaps data was not processing through the ELLs correctly, so we hooked cat5 between the boxes and bypassed the Ells.  This seemed to make them behave better, but not exactly as they should.  I have to say that I am terrible at trouble shooting, since I've have zero problems with all this stuff for years.  We do have about 4-5 inches of snow on the ground with a crust of ice on top, but we aren't tripping any breakers.  Can wet connections cause anything like this?  We shut the show down for the night but I don't quite know where to begin troubleshooting in the morning.

 

Thanks for any thoughts.

Tricia

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Follow your data cables upstream for the problem. Reboot the controller and check all of your cabling. Or simply replace data cables that you might suspect. If you don't have one go to the local hardware store and pick up an Ethernet cable tester most of the big box stores sell them.

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Thanks for the suggestions.  After a day of struggling, it looks like I may have one bad ELL and one controller which just won't power up. I switched it out and ran some cat5 cable and the lights are working as of now.

 

Thanks again for the suggestions.

 

T

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You're describing issues I had in my display which was a bad network port on a CTB16PC controller last year. Whenever a certain controller was plugged into the network, everything would slowly degrade - channels running on the wrong box, channels flickering quickly, channels missing commands entirely. I burned up a DIO8RLY channel when it went into a flicker while troubleshooting. Once the offending controller was removed, everything operated normally.

 

Start eliminating controllers from the end of your daisy chain. Process of elimination, if you're having the same issues I was, you'll find the offender. 

Edited by Stephen Blue
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