2016 Plans

Clarifying;


1. The rope light motif I have that is fed by a 240v standard outlet plug (not a reducing plug pack) is about 9m long and cost a small fortune. I won't be pursuing replacing this out with new lighting, at least not any time soon as it is only the 3rd Christmas of use. I am looking for something that would sit between the outlet and the power cord that can be simply turned ON/OFF by a DMX or E1.31 control. All I want is for it to be turned off when my show requires darkness.


2. My other various lights are all DC. I'm drawing a blank on if they are all 12vDC or some might be 24vDC but that's not a big issue as I have plenty of 12v-24vDC inverters that I can place after the controller.
 
Camknox said:
Clarifying;


1. The rope light motif I have that is fed by a 240v standard outlet plug (not a reducing plug pack) is about 9m long and cost a small fortune. I won't be pursuing replacing this out with new lighting, at least not any time soon as it is only the 3rd Christmas of use. I am looking for something that would sit between the outlet and the power cord that can be simply turned ON/OFF by a DMX or E1.31 control. All I want is for it to be turned off when my show requires darkness.


2. My other various lights are all DC. I'm drawing a blank on if they are all 12vDC or some might be 24vDC but that's not a big issue as I have plenty of 12v-24vDC inverters that I can place after the controller.
Click to expand...

If you are just wanting on/off for this and also plan on buying a DC board for your other lights then I would just use a standard 12vdc coil relay with 240v rated contacts. That way you can control the 240v motif from the DC board through the DC relay.
 
A relay is what I was suggesting for ON and OFF control. I really think you should ask someone electrically qualified to choose it and wire it up. Ideally it would have a coil voltage the same as your low voltage lights. If that's not possible then get one with a coil voltage just below your lights' voltage and add a resistor.

12V DC is very uncommon and so is 24V DC. Are you sure they're DC? 24V AC plugpacks are very common. Low voltage DC plugpacks are typically 30-36V. The voltage and AC/DC will be stated on the plugpacks. If it is AC then you'll need a slightly higher voltage to run them with a DC controller.
 
An easy way to sell is to see what the wattage is measured in. Normally AC Xmas light transformers have the total output measured in VA (Volts Amps).


If you are comfortable then you can wire the relay yourself. No harder than changing a plug, but I have never changed an Australian plug, so maybe it is easier... Or possible harder...


Also, LOR is great. I use LOR software and controllers for my 240v lights because there are no other 240v controllers. Mine is controlling indoor incandescents and it was one of the only pre-built options. For what you are doing, however, an LOR 240v controller is probably not what you need.
 
The easiest way to control lights is to cut off the controller, connect them to a 30vdc power supply and work out which wire does what.


Then put a controller between the 30v power supply and the lights.


An RGB controller is great because they are common + normally.


Look at Hanson Electronics. I used the 2811DC15 and it worked perfectly. All my 24vac lights flashed and dimmed and it was over E1.31.
 
So it's been a few days and in that time I've received a bunch of stuff. I've managed to get everything plugged together but that seems to be about as far as I've gotten.


I have wired 12v to the Pixlite16 and through it to the LED strip. The first 3 LED's are coming on and appear to be a majority green but I can see some red.



I have setup the Pixlite16 controller on my network. I can see it from my office PC and it has been assigned a DHCP address of 192.168.0.188. Not a problem.


Using Advatek Assistant I configured the settings on the LED tab to WS2811/12 (pretty sure that's what mine are)


I fired up Xlights4 and removed all of my testing universes and set up a new one using a Unicast address the same as the controller (192.168.0.188). I gave it a simple 1 universe.


I attempted to turn an individual LED on using the TEST tab but nothing is changing. The 3 LED's are staying the same and no others will activate.


Using the onboard test function of the Pixlite16 does nothing either. I have tested 2 other strips and the same thing is happening.


Any thoughts?
 
Update:


I bared back the wires some more and re-inserted them and now the controller is able to cycle through its test pattern OK. I am still unable to control the lights from Xlights though.
 
Update 2:


I got it working. It was an ID10T problem. Now all I have to do is build everything and get ready!
 
It seems the more I am tinkering the faster my understanding of what I'm doing wrong is. I was seeing under-power issues while testing multiple strings linked by 3m joining cables (I've got it covered for the display but didn't want to go all out setting up for testing) so I instead wired each string to an individual output on the Pixlite. Then I went into the settings and configured each output to be only 50 pixels (150 addresses at 3 per pixel).


This worked well for the first 2 strings but I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the 3rd for a while until I realised I had forgotten to change the default universe for channel 3 back to universe 1. Once I did that I had all strings working perfectly.


So plans for tomorrow are to finish off my remaining spiral trees and then possibly start on the candy cane construction.
 
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