Severe display hardware issues solved today... bad ethernet

[nutz4lights]

So with all the rain we got in Florida the last few days, my display (176 channels of LOR, mix of PC and 40A rated cards) was going absolutely bonkers when running (this is after the rain, but still while stuff was wet). Channels were coming on that shouldn't have been, channels were getting stuck on, some even shimmered when there's no shimmering in the sequence! I was at my wits end. After reading through all the posts here about potentially bad LOR cards this year (I had 5 new cards this year!) I started to fret... but also saw the posts regarding the bad ethernet cables or connections.... I had been having some issues with communication that seemed to be failing ethernet jacks on my boxes, so I decided it was time to spend some time during the day looking into this...

I got out today at 9AM and started pulling ALL my ethernet cables from the 11 controllers. As I was doing this, I noticed that the weatherproof ethernet sockets that I was using to get ethernet into my box (basically a recessed ethernet jack with a gasketed attachment to the box and a pigtail that plugs into the RJ45 jack in the box) were all corroded... turns out, I was using them wrong.... @#$% They came with an extra nipple piece that was supposed to be placed to protect the external socket and I didn't use it... So, probably 5-6 of the 22 of them I had on the 11 controllers had corrosion and were probably causing horribly garbled communication signals to be sent amongst the cards... I can only imagine what that was doing to the COMM lines...

So, I pulled all 22 of those and did it the good old-fashioned way of simply running the CAT5 cable in through a hole and directly plugging it into the LOR card... no more of this fancy-schancy RJ45 jack stuff....

All is well & it is up and running tonight for the first time yet this year. Still only have half of my songs updated and running... remaining songs should be finished this week. Just wanted to put this out there.... if you're having weird issues with lights coming on or staying on that shouldn't be... look into your cables and look at the connections those cables make to the card.... oh, and read the manual that comes with the $4 weatherproof RJ45 socket.... these things are really nice for $4 if used properly.

Thanks for reading,

-Louie

[Jeff Sand]

I will second this post. I also tried equipping some controllers with external RJ45 pigtails several years ago. They never worked reliably due to corrosion and dirt. Have since stopped using most of them.

[nutz4lights]

I am attaching a picture of what I used. Part of my issue was that I didn't find a need for the external portion (the big thick part splits into two segments, the pigtail goes into the box).... well after seeing the corrosion I saw... I now know that I should have used my brain a bit more.

-Louie


Attached files

[nutz4lights]

Sure thing! Here's the link (actually $4.15 each, I was off by $0.15!):

http://www.sparcotech.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=RJ45-ECS

-Louie

[nutz4lights]

Make sure to learn from my lesson above

Merry Christmas!

-Louie