Not worth the effort

[burto51]

Well after a lot of work, again this year, turned the lights on tonight, and see above.

For example Have two singing trees with the correct face definitions, checked, sharing a power supply with three spiral trees, ( two power leads) the trees and the spiral trees are on different ports, with 3 wire ground 2 wire power and 1 wire data. Turn on power supply and random flashes from random nodes, when xschedule starts to play the singing props when not requiored continue to flash randomly, then when required to "sing" Do the face definitions then go back to random flashing.

Note they were not doing this when testing, only eg Controller test colourwash or the Tools test RBG pattern.

Why now.

Also the windows are not lighting, except for some pixels at the end of the model, yes the node counts are correct,

Its been a long 3 days, over it

Thanks Burto

 

[burnt]

what type wire are u using

 

[Kimbo3000]

Hey..

Sorry to hear about your problems.. Just to clarify.. are you wanting some help from people to get it going.. or are you just venting frustrations and over it in general?

imo.. flashing when lights are not supposed to be on is usually a data issue (bad connection, element too far from controller - booster needed, or something similar)

Kimbo

 

[burto51]

Thanks kimbo,
Venting, The singing trees eventually stopped flashing and seemed OK, nothing had changed, the group of spiral trees continued to play up, will look at replacing nodes tomorrow; no problems just another lot of nodes I need to replace, garage outline stopped during testing today turns out the left gable had a dead node which shut rest of outline down, node 20 in 40 node number 8 coro star failed, so Star 9 and 10 didn't work, so replaced all 40 nodes; now good.
Finished playing sequences, computer and controller off, but the spiral trees continued flashing till i shut down the power supply. Will fix its little red wagon tomorrow.
Over having to deal with crap, have sourced nodes from 2 different suppliers to date;.

Cat 6 cable 14 x 0.9 strands, not sure but definitely 14 strand Cat 6. From MJS electrical, Vic.

Anyway bedtime, goodnight all.

 

[Notenoughlights]

Cat6 cable, while it looks thick from the outside, isn't really designed to carry much current, this may be where you're getting flickering from as there may be a large voltage drop.

 

[Kimbo3000]

For the first couple years of our display we used cat5 or 6 (cant remember) for data only.. but ran multiple data through the same cable. This turned out to be a huge mistake and we ended up pulling it all back out and using shielded twin cable (1 cable for each data needed). Probably didnt need to be shielded, but had it on hand.
We had run it through the roof passed 240V cables and all is fine even now 5 or so years later.

You can have a look through the forums, or ask around, at which cables people use for data and power.

I know from experience that different pixel types handle distance and lower voltages due to cables differently. We've previously had a lot of trouble with 3 LED 12V rectangular nodes and are still having troubles with some seed pixel strings (also 12V).

To help work out if it is a cabling problem.. you could just plug in the element (ie snowflake) directly into the controller with as short wire as possible.. and see if it still flickers.. if it doesn't.. maybe wrong cable type.. if it does still flash.. maybe the pixels themselves.. or the green connecter on the controller or maybe the controller port itself.

Good Luck