Hi Guys
The following is just my opinion and I could be totally wrong.
Rant on:
Quickly saying the triac is stuck on or the controller is bad without fully understanding whats going on is silly. I equal this to saying the engine is broken when there is no gas in the gas tank. I read the post that said after the show was done all lights were out but later that night one channel was on. So assumption was the triac was bad. Lets look how DMX works, first there is no error correction, its not needed, its not design for any life safety devices, just light control so there will be on occasions when bad data will be sent. So how can a channel all of the sudden come on? Well one thing I think cuold happen, windows did some check for com port status it was perfect timing to send data to the dongle - the dongle sees a change and figures a value was change and sends it out. The controller sees the change and turns on one channel. Is this the controller or triac at fault? Nope its doing what it was told. Now how about during a show, well it could be a dongle issue or more likely something between the dongle and controller. Example, I have a ver 1 splitter, I know it causes a problem because it effects the ssr4-dmx. To reduce the effects, I put a LE, dmx out 2 between the splitter and ssr4-dmx. Recently it was discovered that the wireless with leds on it was over stressing the transformer with shaky power conditions. Was it the ssr4-dmx or triac to blame, Nope it was a LED drawing too much current. So to say the LE needs a total reset or there is a problem with a triac this is rarely the problem. There is normally something else causing the problem (DMX protocal, etc) There is thousands upon thousands of LE's out there and a very large percent of them with no problems. So the design is solid, a lot of the problems I see come down to assembly issue, soldering, part placement, wrong part, bad load of firmware, part over heated causing premature failure, etc.
So what am I saying. Lets fix some of the real problems first and understand DMX will on occasion do something weird before we try to fix what is not broken. This is in no way picking on any member or even related to this topic.
rant off
Rick R.
