nutz4lights
Full time elf
Hey all, Merry Christmas!
Let's just say that it has been an interesting year... I spent what seems like the entire year working on switching to RGB and it was an interesting adventure. From ordering the wrong lights in the spring with my first shipment, to dealing with a 14 week ship time on our second shipment and receiving lights on December 1st that were supposed to arrive in October, there hasn't been a dull moment. The only reason I was able to maintain my sanity is that I had told myself up front that this was going to be a 2 year project. Adding 7,000+ pixels and another 4,000+ dump RGB nodes and integrating it into my existing 75,000 light display that had been running LOR for 7-8 years wasn't going to be easy. Because of work, family, and not receiving the big portion of the shipment 'til December 1st, I had to basically limit our display... Once I had up what I wanted to run, it would only be fitting that I had additional issues, since nothing this year went as expected.
A good amount of the issues were user error (messing up channel assignments in LSP, messing up controller drawing images in LSP, running the main ethernet cable from the computer to the switch in parallel with two huge power cords which caused all kinds of data issues!). Those were all fixed in 4-5 days with plenty of swearing involved...
The one issue I was left with seems to be focused around the fact that I am trying to control over 20,000 channels of data. I am experiencing an immense amount of slowing when I try to run full color macros (rainbow, or red-green-white), but everything works spectacularly when I work with single color macros. Here is some pertinent information:
Computer: started with a Core 2 Duo laptop (2GB RAM) to run the scheduler app (sequencing done on 1st gen core i7) but then switched to running the scheduler off of the core i7 (6GB RAM) in an attempt to make things better... which did nothing.
Running Unicast
Running gigabit out of the Core i7 out to two 5 port Netgear 10/100 switches. Using a 100 foot CAT6 cable. The switches are daisy chained so that the first one has the input ethernet, three outputs to some of my p12s/r controllers, and then the 5th output goes to the next switch. On that switch, obviously there is the one input and then the other outputs go to the rest of the p12r/s controllers.
Controllers are seven p12s/r controllers.
I am curious how others that require seven or more E1.31 outputs are doing it? Is the daisy chained switches ok or should I go to a single higher port count switch? Any recommendations.
I honestly can't believe that the computer could be the issue. Even though it is a 1st gen core i7, it is still a quad core with eight processing threads and none of them are running over 15% utilization. The RAM is never above around 4GB when the scheduler is running.
I honestly can't believe that it is the cable as I am using an identical make and length cable to stream 30mbit/sec blu-ray from my computer room to our media room.
I guess I haven't mentioned that I am running LSP Advanced or whatever they call it. I have all of the latest updates for scheduler and sequencer.
Here is a link to the 3 minutes of sequencing that I was able to finish before my holiday deadline.
https://vimeo.com/82357322
You should be able to clearly see the slow-down in the rainbow and red-green-white sections of the sequence whereas the mostly red and mostly green sections are smooth.
I've seen some of the awesome displays that y'all run and know that ours is not the largest display around by any means... so how are y'all doing this? Do you see anything glaringly wrong with my setup? The daisy-chained switches perhaps?
Thanks and Merry Christmas! I'm already looking forward to next years display and getting the rest of the elements out on our house...
-Louie
Let's just say that it has been an interesting year... I spent what seems like the entire year working on switching to RGB and it was an interesting adventure. From ordering the wrong lights in the spring with my first shipment, to dealing with a 14 week ship time on our second shipment and receiving lights on December 1st that were supposed to arrive in October, there hasn't been a dull moment. The only reason I was able to maintain my sanity is that I had told myself up front that this was going to be a 2 year project. Adding 7,000+ pixels and another 4,000+ dump RGB nodes and integrating it into my existing 75,000 light display that had been running LOR for 7-8 years wasn't going to be easy. Because of work, family, and not receiving the big portion of the shipment 'til December 1st, I had to basically limit our display... Once I had up what I wanted to run, it would only be fitting that I had additional issues, since nothing this year went as expected.
A good amount of the issues were user error (messing up channel assignments in LSP, messing up controller drawing images in LSP, running the main ethernet cable from the computer to the switch in parallel with two huge power cords which caused all kinds of data issues!). Those were all fixed in 4-5 days with plenty of swearing involved...
The one issue I was left with seems to be focused around the fact that I am trying to control over 20,000 channels of data. I am experiencing an immense amount of slowing when I try to run full color macros (rainbow, or red-green-white), but everything works spectacularly when I work with single color macros. Here is some pertinent information:
Computer: started with a Core 2 Duo laptop (2GB RAM) to run the scheduler app (sequencing done on 1st gen core i7) but then switched to running the scheduler off of the core i7 (6GB RAM) in an attempt to make things better... which did nothing.
Running Unicast
Running gigabit out of the Core i7 out to two 5 port Netgear 10/100 switches. Using a 100 foot CAT6 cable. The switches are daisy chained so that the first one has the input ethernet, three outputs to some of my p12s/r controllers, and then the 5th output goes to the next switch. On that switch, obviously there is the one input and then the other outputs go to the rest of the p12r/s controllers.
Controllers are seven p12s/r controllers.
I am curious how others that require seven or more E1.31 outputs are doing it? Is the daisy chained switches ok or should I go to a single higher port count switch? Any recommendations.
I honestly can't believe that the computer could be the issue. Even though it is a 1st gen core i7, it is still a quad core with eight processing threads and none of them are running over 15% utilization. The RAM is never above around 4GB when the scheduler is running.
I honestly can't believe that it is the cable as I am using an identical make and length cable to stream 30mbit/sec blu-ray from my computer room to our media room.
I guess I haven't mentioned that I am running LSP Advanced or whatever they call it. I have all of the latest updates for scheduler and sequencer.
Here is a link to the 3 minutes of sequencing that I was able to finish before my holiday deadline.
https://vimeo.com/82357322
You should be able to clearly see the slow-down in the rainbow and red-green-white sections of the sequence whereas the mostly red and mostly green sections are smooth.
I've seen some of the awesome displays that y'all run and know that ours is not the largest display around by any means... so how are y'all doing this? Do you see anything glaringly wrong with my setup? The daisy-chained switches perhaps?
Thanks and Merry Christmas! I'm already looking forward to next years display and getting the rest of the elements out on our house...
-Louie