I have 4 controllers from the coop and 4 that I built by buying pcbs from the store and parts from Mouser. My dumb strings are the ones in the wiki. I went back to my order to check and the link is identical. Just my gut, but I am suspicious of your power source. You seem to be the only one posting about node failures and if there were major issues with the nodes, I believe we would be seeing a slew of posts about bad nodes just like we saw with the original smart nodes.
It could be power supply related, but I've have the same problem with two different types of power supplies - 12vdc led 400 watt power supplies, and an ATX power supply. I'm not the only one posting about failures, read the thread from the beginning. I think I'm just the one with the biggest mouth. Sorry.
So far, you're the only one using a DSC with a dumb string that has reported success, at least on this thread. Everyone else is using DSCs with other lights or using MR16s to power their dumb strings. I guess the one thing that's different about your situation is that you're powering just one string, so that is a lot less of a current being switched on and off.
I have a few hundred dumb nodes controlled by MR 16's this year.
0 failures.
Definitely seems to be DSC & dumb string related. Not either one alone. Seems very odd that everyone using MR16 hasn't had a bad node, but myself, mokeefe, kjam22, mitch09, and frankr are reporting between 5-10% failure rates.
I bought 12 of the 100 pixel dumb strings from Ray. I have about 4 to 5 failures on every string. It is always either the red or blue (or both) LED that is out, never the green. I am using DSC's with ATX computer power supply to control them. The strings are spread over 3 different hubs/power supplies. Due to time constraints I didn't do much testing of the strings prior to setting them up outside so I can't say if this if these failures were there initially or have occurred since running them. I don't think I'm seeing increasing failures since my show has been running, but I haven't done specific counts. My sense is they are just bad or marginal nodes -- perhaps a bad run from Ray. I'll be contacting Ray to get replacements nodes and will have a do a bunch of splicing at the end of the season.
Mike, you may want to hold off splicing. kjam22 and myself had fixed some of our strings, just to have them burn out again.