Lights not going off as should (Animated Lighting) - VENDOR - Animated Lighting Odds and Ends Read Only. No more posting. - PlanetChristmas! Forums. Read Only. We've moved to http://talk.planetchristmas.com - The Forums of PlanetChristmas have moved to http://talk.PlanetChristmas.com
For some reason the lights are not going off as should. They either don't turn on or don't fade and they worked fine last night but now they are messed up!
I recompiled the entire show twice and downloaded it twice but to no avail!
What's wrong with it?
I am so stressed with the situation and how every time I try to fix something, another thing breaks. If anybody can help, I'm at my last strand of hope (no pun intended)
P.S. Sorry for my harsh tone but I'm really stressed
Last edited on Sunday December 16th, 2007 04:20 am by thefilmmaker91
Oh yeah, one more thing, I'm using Animation Director and sometimes the songs go nuts half-way through, and then the next time the song plays it will be mostly fine.
Beware... There are company representatives here who do care and do answer questions, even late at night. Badmouthing the company will not endear you to those people .
With that said, could one of the Mods please move this to the AL board? Once it is there I'm sure someone will jump in and try to help.
oldcqr wrote: Beware... There are company representatives here who do care and do answer questions, even late at night. Badmouthing the company will not endear you to those people .
With that said, could one of the Mods please move this to the AL board? Once it is there I'm sure someone will jump in and try to help.
I am not trying to badmouth the company. It's just that I've been having issues with the program and haven't been able to get help.
Are you using a MB/MP3 (The new Monster Brain in the small box with built-in MP3 player)?
If so, I suspect that you're running into the same problem we had last year: simply put, it sometimes doesn't work. What we ended up doing was to have a PC near the MB and play all audio files off the PC (but still running the show from the MB), avoiding the built-in MP3 player. This "solved" the problem, and we've gone with that setup this year as well, although it's far from ideal.
Basically, what's happening is that the MB is sometimes missing the sync pulses from the MP3 player. With the old MB & MP3 there was a separate sync cable that one could suspect, but in the case of the new units, it's all inside the box - but it's the same problem.
What I suspect, but have not yet proven, is that it's really an electrical noise problem exacerbated by the non-isolated RS-485 design that AL uses in the MB and all of the controllers. IF that's the case, inserting an isolated RS-485 repeater in the line, or inserting a pair of packet radios in the line might be a long term solution.
After talking with Ron Smith at http://www.rs485.com, I'm planning on inserting an isolated RS-485 hub into my system to break it into 3 separate, isolated segments. If that does what I hope if will do, I'll post back. In the meantime, try running the audio off the PC (if possible in your setup, that is).
Last edited on Sunday December 16th, 2007 04:06 pm by CarlD
No offense to CarlD, but I did a commercial job last year with 13 separate controllers, on a 2 story office building, with a cable running across a parking lot, and didn't have any problems with the RS-485 that AL is using in their products.
It is important to use good Cat-5 cables, make sure your power is good, and if necessary, terminate the ends of the runs in the last controllers.
I was using the "new" MB/MP3 combo, and the show ran for 17-20 consecutive nights, with someone unplugging the MB each night and taking it back inside, putting it out the next.
I'm using the "old" MB/MP3 combo in my personal show, and have 10 separate controller boxes, including 2 on the roof of the house. Had problems talking to one of the controllers, and re-routed the cat-5 away from some power cords, and have had no problems since...Show runs every night via schedule, and except for some GFCI problems turning off a few controllers, it runs and runs...
____________________ Mark Schell
Kernersville, NC
20,000 lights and counting...
Proud user of Animated Lighting
Cords and cords are pretty much on top of eachother in our system. Do powercords really have that much of an affect on cat5s? We have cat5s and powercords running side by side and they seemed to work at first...the real problems occured when we added speakers.
mschell wrote: No offense to CarlD, but I did a commercial job last year with 13 separate controllers, on a 2 story office building, with a cable running across a parking lot, and didn't have any problems with the RS-485 that AL is using in their products.
It is important to use good Cat-5 cables, make sure your power is good, and if necessary, terminate the ends of the runs in the last controllers.
Oh, I've no doubt - it works great a lot of the time and in a lot of setups, but it's fickle. Drew mentioned at the training in Northern CA earlier in the year something to the effect of "yeah, some MBs have that problem sometimes". Interestingly, if I remove the MB from the system and use a CONV-2 board direct from the PC, I have a different set of apparently-comm related issues. This is all on brand new, top quality, tested CAT-5 cables too.
An interesting tidbit from http://www.rs485.com - CAT5 is really the wrong wire for RS485. It's characteristic impedance is too low, which lowers the noise immunity of the system. Sadly, the "right wire" (e.g. Belden 9841) is rather pricey compared to CAT5.
At any rate, the acid test will be to put in the isolated hub and see what, if any effect it has.
I did not realize people were waiting on results. I'm about to call Rick at AL but my results were futile. I did move the cat5 cable over to a different hub but there is still a delay in the music. A possiblity could be the speakers im using (or so I'm told).
*ADDEND: Rick was unavailable so they're going to call me back.
Last edited on Monday December 17th, 2007 05:13 pm by thefilmmaker91
Power stats for controller 1 (30 amp LC-16): There are (obviously) two powerjacks. The first one I tested was the one that also controlled the heartbeat and other electrical equipment. The second was for the other half of the sockets.
Greg Parcell wrote: Please try and keep only one thread going on this topic - you'll never get any help by posting the same issues in two different threads.
Absolutly right! I'm going to the other post that I have so please don't post here anymore. I will not be checking it.
thefilmmaker91 wrote: For some reason the lights are not going off as should. They either don't turn on or don't fade and they worked fine last night but now they are messed up!
I recompiled the entire show twice and downloaded it twice but to no avail!
What's wrong with it?
I am so stressed with the situation and how every time I try to fix something, another thing breaks. If anybody can help, I'm at my last strand of hope (no pun intended)
P.S. Sorry for my harsh tone but I'm really stressed
I do believe what you describe sounds a lot like what I get when my Cat5 cable is bad. Replacing your data cables can make all these malfunctions stop malfunctioning and work correctly again. We had to replace every single cable in our display this year and it worked. Went from having severe malfunctions to a very reliable show again. Cables left unused in attic or even laying in yard from year to year just get crudded up and useless for our stuff...
Also it doesnt always work great running macros, stand alone animations for some controllers and music synced grids out of the same monster brain. Some commands between the stand alone and the music sync contradict each other and reverse each other's commands, fades and effects.
thefilmmaker91 wrote: Cords and cords are pretty much on top of eachother in our system. Do powercords really have that much of an affect on cat5s? We have cat5s and powercords running side by side and they seemed to work at first...the real problems occured when we added speakers.
Yes... very severe problems. DO not run your Cat5 cables parallel to powerlines although they can T- over a series of power cords. Watch rolling up your cords and then next year unwinding them and you get hard kinks into the wire that kinks really hard on the wire when stretching them out. This can ruin the wire and cause the problems you are describing. For me its less of failures to turn ON lights when they are supposed to, we get more of lights being left ON that dont turn off and improper fades. We have some 18 LC500's in our system and our system is so large its become very very very sensative to the condition of ALL our cables.
Introducing ONE bad cable anywhere on the system can cause multiple LC500's to malfunction until you remove or replace that cable. Also if a breaker throws to any one of the LC's on the system or any one is plugged in but not powered on, it seems to cause malfunctions to several other working LC's in the system. You can trace your offending cat5 cable but isolating your LC's or ELD's one by one until the remaining ones are working correctly with no malfunctions.
We have to replace 2 to 8 cables every other year to make our system reliable again. This season we had so many problems we replaced ALL 18 cat5 cables and now working perfectly spec!
Joe's comments are very accurate. Most of the problems I've either had or helped troubleshoot for others come down to cable issues. Either the cable itself or the connectors.
I use 14 controllers now, and when I setup, I fire them up one at at time, test throughly and then add the next one. If I start to see some unusual activity, the first thing I'll do is swap the cable and 9 times out of 10, that does the trick.
I am having this same problem this year, lights staying on when they should go odd. It's driving me nuts.
I have rerouted and or replaced all my cat5 cables, which most of them were new when I started.
I have 4 of my controllers in one area mounted on the back of the Narivity stable. All the ext cords of course are coming out of the bottom to the ground and the cat5s I have coming out the bottom grommet up the side, and over the top of the controller down the other side and into the next controller and so on.
I am running live from my computer this year. Last year I ran from the MB and had no problems.
The things my show is doing fits all the symptoms of "noise" in the cat5 that I have read here.
I am thinking about replacing all the cat5 cables on the 4 controllers that are on the stable with 3' cables which would be long enough. Right now the controllers have 6' cat5 cables.
I will take a picture of where my controllers are mounted and see if you all think thats the problem.
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