DJ Party Lights and CTB16PC ?

[Victory402]

I'm having a new problem with my Birthday party show in 3 weeks.

Last night we plugged in everything and ran the show. Half way through the last song my laptop(IBM stinkpad, 1gig, pent 3)locked up and the show crashed(music kept playing).

Friday I ran the show flawlessly, but the party lights (5) were not plugged in.

As you know these party light have little motors in them to swirl and move the lights. It seems to me I read somewhere that you can't run motors on a ctb16pc.

Could this be whats causing the show to crash?

My son did a preformance check and we are only using 22% of the CPU usage.

These are really small motors and my thinking was I didn't need to wire up relays to control them. Am I wrong?

[JBullard]

Vic,

The motors in the party lights could be a problem with LOR.

You didn't say if you were also trying to dim the party lights or not. If so, could be a large part of the problem, though I've never heard of it causing a pc to crash.

(Question - did the PC crash or the the LOR program crash?)

In general, although ymmv, a small motor load on a LOR channel that is ONLY on 100% or off, no dimming, should be OK

If in your tests the problem is repeatable each time the party lights are used, then the relays may be the only solution

[Victory402]

JB,

Thanks for the reply.

It is LOR that's crashing. On, Off control only, no dimmings, twinkles or shimmers on the party lights.

It happens shortly after the Party lights begin to do their thing.

Vic

[JBullard]

Well Vic, in that case, time to try the relays.

[Victory402]

LOL, I hear ya...my gut feeling too.

I have some spare channels on one of my DC controler boards and a bunch of 12v relays. I guess I'm going out to the shop to wire em up. I'll keep ya posted.

Thanks again,

Vic

[cmoore60]

I would suggest that you might also try the filtered USB cable. Although we have seen the need for this in relation to problems with LOR, but the communications is also into the computer. So could be some feedback from LOR to the computer.

Chuck

[Victory402]

Chuck,

It's funny you mentioned this. While wiring up my relays, I noticed one of my Cat5 cables running too close to a power line. I separated the two. And yes I'm using one of the filtered cables.

At any rate, the show ran perfect for me.

One thing though, I watched my pc's system preformance in the task manager window durring the whole show and it hit 92% at one point...ugh! i know i still have useless windows crap running, which isn't helping. I'm looking into some more ways to lower that percentage down to 75.

This is a great forum, great hobby, great people.

Thanks all,

Vic

[Tim Herberger]

Victory402 wrote:

One thing though, I watched my pc's system preformance in the task manager window durring the whole show and it hit 92% at one point...ugh! i know i still have useless windows crap running, which isn't helping. I'm looking into some more ways to lower that percentage down to 75.

Are you running the show with the sequence editor open or with the show scheduler?

The editor uses a lot more of the system resources than the running with the show scheduler.

If your running the show with the editor try unchecking the boxes under the play menu, move grid with play and vary color of channel buttons, that should help free up some of your PC's resources.

[Victory402]

I would suggest that you might also try the filtered USB cable. Although we have seen the need for this in relation to problems with LOR, but the communications is also into the computer. So could be some feedback from LOR to the computer.

Chuck


___________________________________________________________

Chuck,

A friend over in the Christmas Carolina forum has suggested the same thing about the feedback and plugging my pc into a seperate outlet. I'm going to keep this possibility on the front burner and get busy isolating cables.

Thanks,

Vic