RJ
A little background then the question.
I used two Lynx Dongles this year, one to send DMX to the Freestyle and the other to send DMX to the 7 Tiger controllers. Now during testing for months prior to seting up in the yard I would get a controller lock up maybe once every 3-6 hours due to the firmware not being quite as robust as it should be. Never happened at 50ms timings only at 25ms and only when fading all channels real slow.
Put controllers in yard and ran around 180metres of CAT5 for the DMX - first time had the CAT5 right next to the 240v Power cables, big mistake, controllers continually locked up!
Lesson: keep CAT5 DMX away from AC Power feed cables.
Re-routed the CAT5 and problem minimised but still an issue for controllers at the far end of the yard - brute force fix - enabled controller reboot via watch dog timer when DMX processing failed.
Real life: During very slow colour changes 3 of the 7 controllers would randomly reboot, not everytime or at the same time but usually 1-2 times every 15 minutes.
I reached the conclusion it was induced noise in the CAT5 cable causing the firmware to see a break at the wrong time and then by not checking for a DMX start code on the Tiger controllers I then got locked in a loop, decided to live with it and fix later.
Here is the weird twist.
On the 30th the show computer decided that it no longer liked the 40+ celsius degree temperatures it had been subject to and the hard drive failed.
Took the fairly new laptop out and installed the Dongle drivers moved vixen and fired everything up so I could run for two more nights.
Sitting outside tonight I was suprised to notice that not one controller reset occured in over 30 minutes, enough to ask the following.
Is it possible that the voltage supplied from the USB ports (if a little low) on the first computer could cause a slightly lower signal to noise ratio signal to be transmitted?
Would it be advisable to run multiple Dongles from a powered Hub?
I Still need to fix the firmware though
Cheers
Phil
