Jump to content
Light-O-Rama Forums

False Inputs Being Detected


aidancar

Recommended Posts

 

Yesterday I spent my day constructing a nice wooden enclosure and wiring three buttons into it along with two LEDS  to allow people driving by in cars to interact with my show. Last night however I saw in the show log when I got back from dinner that the buttons had been pressed a surprising amount of times. Being a bit skeptical, I reviewed my camera footage to find that they had only actually been pressed two times when the log showed at least 10. I immediately brought in the box and took it apart to triple check that there were no bad connections or anything of the sorts, and there were not. I then put it back out by the curb but disconnected the 3.3v from the LOR header thinking maybe the leds sharing a common ground with the buttons were screwing it up, but that did not fix it I then disconnected the buttons from the cat 5 cable to bring to bring them in to look at the next day and with them unplugged from the cat 5 it registered a button being pressed. Frustrated I disconnected the cat 5 cable from the LOR controller and that finally stopped it. Today I replaced the cheap 100ft cat5 cable I got from amazon with a few quality cables attached end to end and I took apart all of the female to female cat5 couplers in use and rewired them. Tonight the amount of false presses had definitely decreased, but they are still happening. The show had been running for an hour so far and it had 2 false presses. I was thinking it may be the length or the run (from 50-75 ft) but I can't shorten that. Any ideas?  BTW: Using a Gen 3 CTB16PC

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, your long cable length is likely the problem, although I have a few of mine that are not that much shorter.  I'm not using Cat-5, but rather SPT-1, but I doubt that is the difference.  The solution may be to add a small relay close to the controller.  Have the button control the relay and the relay contacts trigger the input.  The higher current involved in the relay will decrease interference potential.

BTW, mine are using an InputPup.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The relays are a great idea! I have 3 buttons down there which is why I'm using the cat 5 (Plus LED Power) i'll have to look into buying 3 of them if I cant find any other way to fix it. Thanks!  I love the input pups! I built a 16 channel input box that sits in the "control room" next to me with 2 of them in it, makes it much easier to test songs, turn on off lights, skip songs, and of course pick the best song when I see a car pulling up haha.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Update: Thanks for the tip! I made an inline box with three relays and with a little rewiring it works great now! Not a single false input, Thanks again :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Glad that helped.

Sent from my Droid Turbo via Tapatalk, so blame any typos or spelling errors on Android

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Jim... I know that the problem has been fixed, but I would like to add this.... (for future readers..) I had almost the same Issue, doing some sluth work, I found that it was my electric fencer (you know for horses), somehow over 1000 ft. appart, was triggering stuff in LOR.

Solution was to run terminators on the RS485 that is running on the cables to the LOR controllers... "TaDa" my problem was fixed... by to little resistors.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • The topic was locked
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...