Help lights went out

[JerryBecker]

Hey there, I am hoping someone can provide some assistance with my lights. I have a Hinks pic pro to run the show as the main controller and I have an Alpha pix pro to run my 12 strand CCR tree. Everything has worked great since halloween with a little bit of lag but I am running on wireless so I was told that was to be expected. Tonight my CCR tree stopped working. It is not the network cable as I replaced it. I rebooted everything. The CCR Tree communicates everyone once in a while but mostly dark all night tonight. Nothing has changed with set up just really weird. I tested the Alpha pix to ensure lights workied etc and they all work. No communication. I am running xlights. Could I restore a back up that might work? My apha pix controller firmware in from 2016. Should I update? I am lost as to why all of a sudden it stopped. Thanks for any gudeance

 

[merryoncherry]

There's one silly mistake people make that can cause a controller that was working to act weird, and it's to leave "Output To Lights" turned on in xLights while the player is running, resulting in the controller getting 2 sets of data to choose from. Unlikely, but easy enough to check.

Otherwise, this is a bit of a stumper because it was working and you didn't change anything, and it still works occasionally.

I have had this happen for two reasons, both of them seem like long shots in your situation:
1. The power supplies in the AlphaPix. Mine sort of stopped last year... I'm not sure if they actually died or if they didn't like the A/C power they were receiving, but they wouldn't power the unit sometimes. I field swapped the unit, put Meanwells in it, and it has been running fine this year. Funny thing was I couldn't reproduce the power problem in the lab... and it did stop working about the time that I noticed that branch was way overloaded... so maybe the PSUs were fine but unhappy with the inrush on power up, or the voltage had become low, or... Anyway I think you'd have noticed if it was acting like it is turned off... all the lights in the enclosure will be off even though there is A/C voltage.
2. The network. One usually doesn't image the network cutting in and out for long periods of time like that, but I have seen one situation where it did. There are a few critical packets of data that the controller must send back to the player, or the player will quit sending data... the controller will look fine but it just won't be receiving data. (The technical name is the ARP packet - address resolution protocol - that the controller must send back to claim its IP address and associate it with the Ethernet MAC address to which data is actually sent by the switches.) No blinking network light, OLED will show idle, etc. I am not sure of your network topology, but if it is player->wifi->Hinks->CAT cable->AlphaPix, there are things that could go wrong and cause the packet to be dropped, either with wifi or the internal switch in the Hinks. And as far as what changed, it could just be your network got busier, signal degraded, something like that. And if the ARP packet gets through occasionally, it works for a little while... if it doesn't, it doesn't.

I had that frustrating experience last year... one controller cutting in and out completely:


So, how do you tell if this is the cause, and if so, what to do about it:
1. I could tell that the show player network traffic amount was changing when the controller started/stopped working. Because show traffic is constant frame rate uncompressed, this is not expected, and was a clue that the player was not sending the data at all... the problem was the player, not the controller.
2. I set static ARP entries on the player and it fixed the problem.
3. You could also just redo the network to better spec and see what happens, wire everything with little switches.

Sorry I don't have any better ideas... this happens in the hobby every now and then, you'll have to really troubleshoot each thing - is the traffic sent but not received, or not sent at all, these are key distinctions to make and the tools available to get the answers depend on your particular setup.

 

[JerryBecker]

in the web browser you enter in the IP address to look at he controller settings. When i try to do this it sometimes comes on and sometime not. When I use my old LOR computer with Static IP to alpha pix with an LOR sequence to the tree everything works fine. I think its the ethernet connection on the hinks pic went bad. That is my only explaination.

 

[merryoncherry]

For those following, we looked at this a bit in the chatroom and found a fire stick had taken the IP address of the AlphaPix.
What I learned from this is to consider using xScanner earlier in the debugging process .