Non LOR equipment (advice)

[ebrown1972]

Each year, I test every prop I have in my basement. After testing, I get my display ready by setting everything up in the yard and on the house. I then re-test everything prior to opening night. No matter what though it seems every opening night, I find pixel failures and props not working correctly. Last night a portion of one of my 8 foot snowflakes was out and 2 of my arches were not lit. I have fixed the arches (loose connection on a pigtail) and will attempt to fix the big snowflake later today when it gets a little warmer. I am all pixels minus several 5mm strobes and xenon strobes. It should be noted that the only hardware in my display that is LOR is a 16 channel AC controller. The rest is all DIY.

If anyone is thinking about going completely DIY just remember, you will probably deal with failures and more issues than you want to. All of my pixels came from vendors directly from China. Although the price is good most of the time, I do not believe the quality holds up to LOR's equipment. When I was 100% LOR, I rarely had any issues and when I did contact was made with LOR and the product would be sent back and fixed by LOR or just completely replaced by them at no cost to me. LOR has the best customer support of any company I know.

So if you are thinking about saving a few more bucks and ditching your LOR equipment, take it from me, you will probably be more frustrated in the end.

[Mr. P]

I am the complete opposite. This year I am running 41 non-LOR controllers on E1.31, five LOR controllers on RS485 and none of my lights are LOR. I have never had a major problem, just small things like loose wires, blown triac or something and usually my issues are operator head space. I have backups for everything from lights to controllers and most of my lights last for years. I have many lights that have been out 365 for years and my landscape lights have been going strong for almost three years now. My entire display is DIY as I don't buy packages so I make all my own props. I may buy a coro form but I always purchase my own lights separately. I can build a 24x50 matrix for $450 complete instead of paying $1000 for a package, without a single issue.

Don't get me wrong, LOR has some great stuff and an unbeatable warranty but you have to weight out the difference on purchasing that warranty in the price of the item or going out and purchasing your own items.

[TheDucks]

When I took down my 5' Star of David /Cross, I noted 13 of the Dumb rectangular modules had some sort of failure (not my connections at fault). That season started with 2 dead modules

Re-did this year with 143 Smart bullets (Lots of holes and Hot glue) but only 3 pigtails feeding (could have probably done as 1 big string, but HU would not let me set the Pixie above 100 and I wanted the Test button useful for a quick test). I have a spare 400W  External wr/PSU (good thing as the vendor dropped those style this year and all my boxes have them on the back side to allow multiple boards inside)

FWIW I wish all LOR controller had a Simple test sequence button like the Pixies (works, even if the Network is active)

[dibblejr]

IMO- the 2020 and 2021 pixels from China have been sub standard. I have seen failures that you wouldn't believe from sellers who I never had a failure. I had nodes shipped to friends directly from the sellers and both friends had close to a 50% failure rate this year.

You get what you pay for. At least LOR stands behind their products.

JR

[Mr. P]

27 minutes ago, dibblejr said:

IMO- the 2020 and 2021 pixels from China have been sub standard. I have seen failures that you wouldn't believe from sellers who I never had a failure. I had nodes shipped to friends directly from the sellers and both friends had close to a 50% failure rate this year.

You get what you pay for. At least LOR stands behind their products.

JR

I am still going through the large supply, 100+ strings/ribbons, that I purchased in 2017-18 so I haven't needed to purchase any recently. I have had zero pixel failures last year or this year so I am still sitting on a large cache of pixels.

[dibblejr]

12 minutes ago, Mr. P said:

I am still going through the large supply, 100+ strings/ribbons, that I purchased in 2017-18 so I haven't needed to purchase any recently. I have had zero pixel failures last year or this year so I am still sitting on a large cache of pixels.

Mine either but the ones that were direct shipped to them have been painful.

JR

[k6ccc]

2 hours ago, dibblejr said:

IMO- the 2020 and 2021 pixels from China have been sub standard. I have seen failures that you wouldn't believe from sellers who I never had a failure.

Can't speak for 2021, but my observation as well for 2020 (pre-pandemic).

 

[ebrown1972]

6 hours ago, dibblejr said:

IMO- the 2020 and 2021 pixels from China have been sub standard. I have seen failures that you wouldn't believe from sellers who I never had a failure. I had nodes shipped to friends directly from the sellers and both friends had close to a 50% failure rate this year.

You get what you pay for. At least LOR stands behind their products.

JR

JR, the pixels I dealt with this morning on my 8 foot snowflake were the 20-21 pixels from China so I'm sure I will deal with even more failures later but luckily I didn't buy that many pixels last year.

[Greg Young]

Mr P, like you I run a combination of LOR controllers on the RS485 network, and a number of other pixel controllers over E1.31 (4 Advatek, one Stella). System has been unchanged last several years and has worked fine. Am running LOR4.4.4.

I have 2 NICs in pc, one for household system with the usual DHCP IP address, other for display set to a (10.10.10.x address).

Controllers are found on the display network (10.10.10.x) and tests show all pixels work normally, so I thought I was good to go again, but when I stared the show last night the 485 LOR regular network works fine, but nothing goes over the 10.10.10.x system. to any of the pixel controllers. BTW I run multicast,

I went into network preferences section of LOR software, and everything looked fine. When I clicked on any cell in the DMX section (IP address, protocol, or even comment), to try an experiment to change an IP address to see if that would work the network preferences box immediately closes. Not sure why, but it seems like something on the LOR side is amiss.

I just upgraded to 4.4.16, in case there may have been an incompatibly with 4.4.4 and win 10 (the only upgrades to my pc has been the usual win 10 updates, no betas), but the network configuration still immediately closes when I try to edit anything in the DMX tab.

Attached is a screen shot of the network configuration: 

I have never had issues with LOR/this machine before, and am clueless as to why it stopped working.

Any thoughts from folks would be appreciated because the vast majority of the display is now dead.

Edited November 27, 2021 by Greg Young
typos

[Mr. P]

Not sure why NP would be shutting down when you click on it but you mentioned your controllers are set up on 10.10.10.x but your snapshot shows 239.255.0.x

[Greg Young]

Exactly, and I don't know why, hence me trying to change the network preferences to 10.10.0.x, but it keeps immediately shutting down whenever I try to edit anything in the network preferences section of the LOR software. Upgrading it from 4.4.4 to 4.4.16 it didn't fix it... 

It's been years since I added E1.31 and I don't recall what the network preferences setting looked like.

I do send the E1.31 data as multicast, so I would think that would go out to all units the pc can detect on either NIC card, which is why I unplug the pc's CT5e connector from the primary NIC card to the house LAN when running the show, leaving just the 2nd NIC card plugged into the display network

 

[TheDucks]

10.x.x.x sound like a (default) Comcast (AKA Xfinity) DHCP.

You really should run a show on an Isolated Ethernet as other network traffic can randomly affect traffic.

To find your PC's IP. You can open a command prompt and type: ipconfig /all

or use the control panel: Properties (and scroll down)

[Greg Young]

I guess my old brain just couldn't remember that with multicast, it shouldn't matter, so I unplugged my primary NIC card from the home LAN, leaving just the second one hooked up, and it worked!

Apparently, the DMX out was going to the primary NIC card, not the display one, which explains the network config values not being the 10.10.10.x that they should have been. I am not sure how/why that was changed.

I still can't edit the network preferences in the DMX tab, so there is an issue with the software, but I don't need to. After the first of the year when I upgrade to S5, I'll worry about it then.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions, they are very much appreciated!

[k6ccc]

As I said to Greg in a direct message, his combination of multicast (hence the 239.255.x.x addresses shown) and two active Ethernet networks left the computer not knowing where to send packets.  Two solutions.  1) as he did and disconnect the home network, and 2) use Unicast.