Issue with D2

[indudio]

Hi,

Tonight I was testing my lights and all of a sudden nothing.

To my surprise my controllers don't blink red lights indicating Dmx signal. Even with the small light on the output of the D2 saying it outputting DMX.

I plug it into output 2 on the D2 - and all the boards red lights flash indicating signal. However I believe this is set up to universe 2. When i try and log in through my IP address it won't connect. Have tried this on multiple computers.

I have changed cables multiple times and am baffled as to why the D2 has all of a sudden stuffed up like this. Pretty annoyed as its close to show time and yeah.

 

[David_AVD]

Did you try powering down for a minute then testing again?

 

[indudio]

ok,

so this is weird.

I powered it off, and low and behold it works. But when I power up the 3rd bank of power supplies, the dmx signal on all controllers goes to red and stops. Unplug that bank and off it goes again!

So any thoughts on the cause of this?

 

[dkulp]

This happened to mine a week before my halloween show. It would respond to multicast packets, but not to any IP address for a direct browser connection or unicast. Very annoying. I eneded up opening it up, setting the jump that resets the IP address, re-powering, and then reconfiguring everything. Very annoying.


As far as the loss of the DMX signal, what do your settings look like and how many channel are on that port? I was having that problem with xLights as it was sending a full 512 channel universe even though there were only 24 channels on the port. (I then fixed that in xLights) In that case, the D2 has to send out a full 512 channels which takes longer. There seems to be a bug in the D2 that if a "ping" packet is going out whne a real packet is supposed to as well, it creates an overrun and hangs and doesn't recover. Make sure you set the ping timeout to 200 or so.

 

[David_AVD]

There seems to be a bug in the D2 that if a "ping" packet is going out whne a real packet is supposed to as well, it creates an overrun and hangs and doesn't recover. Make sure you set the ping timeout to 200 or so.

Can you expand on the sequence of events that causes this please? The reason I ask is that I had a (customised) D2 seem to lock up the DMX port only yesterday and I don't know why it happened.

 

[dkulp]

Can you expand on the sequence of events that causes this please? The reason I ask is that I had a (customised) D2 seem to lock up the DMX port only yesterday and I don't know why it happened.

I really don't know all the details. I just know I kept having overruns that kept locking up the DMX port. For me, the overruns occurred WAY WAY more frequently when using xLights so I started packet logging that and discovered the universe size thing.


So hint number 1: set the universe size to no more than what you actually have connected. I've seen people recommend setting the initial size to 512. That makes it take longer to output as is has to output all 512 channels, even if only 20 or 30 are used.


Hint number 2: check your setting for the "ping". I THOUGHT I had it 200ms, but apparently I missed a 0 and had it set at 20. Since it takes 22ms to output a full 512 channels, I think the ping was occuring before the channel was fully written out. Not really sure though.


Anyway, flipped to 200ms and also fixed the xLights e1.31 output and it was stable for the 3 weeks I ran the Halloween show. That said, there definitely is some sort of bug in the firmware.. The overruns are likely preventable, and even if there is an overrun, it should just pause for 1/2 a second and reset or something.

 

[indudio]

Well I narrowed it down to this.

I have 18 ray Wu 27 ch controllers.

For some reason it works OK for 16 controllers, but when I power up one specific power supply for 2 controllers the dmx signal stops. Unplug this power supply and it works.

I have about 430 channels all up.

So not sure what this means

 

[David_AVD]

Ray Wu power supplies as well? Maybe a ground loop and/or lots of interference from one or more power supplies?

 

[indudio]

Yeah, might swap the power supply and see if that rectify it