First Problem with an LE.

[Dennis Cherry]

Came home tonight with friends from dinner. Stopped to watch a few songs and noticed one of my mini trees the Blue LED's are coming on erratically while the sequence is playing but not between songs.

I could not predict when it would come on.

This set of controllers is direct wired to the IDMX, no other mini light channels are randomly doing this.

There is 8 mini trees direct wired and it is the 5th tree in the row and have 8 mini trees with wireless. The wireless min trees are working fine.

To dark to trouble shot now, but need to figure this out tomorrow. I have 6 controllers in this direct wired chain, really do not know which controller in this chain is doing this.

Suggestions please.

[memphislights]

What version LE?

Temperature near freezing?  You may need to warm up the case if it is a pre v5 LE.  Test using a hair dryer or heat gun to warm up the regulators when channels are misfiring consistently.

If not a v5 LE, do you have snubber resistors on all LED channels in the display?

Is it just one channel or several channels misfiring?  Sometimes the random firing is caused by cold solder joints as well.

[Dennis Cherry]

Looks like another triac bit the dust.

Started out looking like random turn on with one channel, then started getting more and more and looked like i had a couple of channels assigned to one channel. Did not come on between songs.

Before the night show was over the channel was on all the time and stayed on all night.

Got to pull the controller and change #15 out.

BTW:

All my controllers did not have the readout displays on, but the controllers where working just fine.  Is there a timer in the firmware that will turn them off?

Did push the reset button on all of them and the display's came back on. 
Never seen that before.

[memphislights]

The 3 LED readout is on all the time.

I would guess that all of the standard troubleshooting would be in order...

possible that when the triac went, it fed back enough to hang the LE
cold solder joints
maybe the PIC needs to be reprogrammed

[RJ]

Yes the LED display stays on all the time as the night light for the pic. Otherwise it gets scared in the dark.

How cold was it?

RJ

[Dennis Cherry]

Morning temps are only in the 30's.

Looked at my wireless units and they are the same way the digital readouts of the controller number are not on.

The controllers are working just fine that way.


 

[Jeffl]

We should see a low of 0 tonight before our show stops with -3 as the low.  So far I have not seen a problem and we have been in the low teens most nights.

[Jeffl]

Mine ran at -2 last night.  Everything worked from what I could tell as I was spying out the window while people watched.  Today I went out and opened them up and everything is still lit up like normal.  They have been running for three weeks straight now.