Caution with the Network cables you use!!!

[egenoup]

I finished building a hub and one SSC and picked up a replacement 100 Ohm 5W resistor (they did not have the 3W...) from the local electronics shop.  Programmed all the pics and re-flashed one of my dongles to make it a pixelnet dongle.  Needed two network cables, one from the dongle to the hub and one from the hub to the ssc.  Went to my drawer of cables and pulled out the only cat5 cable left.  Looked around my computer room and could not find any other cat5.  Remembered I had two new cables in the car.  Fetched one from the car (it was a 14 ft one).  Used the shorter cable from my drawer on the dongle and the long cable for the ssc.
 
It was time to power it up and see if the magic smoke came out.....



Nope no magic smoke... but I could not get the programming utility to program the ssc.... HMMMM... So I re-flashed the SSC with the test firmware and all is good... Now what    The hub?  The dongle?  The hub is too simple to mess up... hmmmm... The dongle was a known working dongle, so it must still work.  Re-flashed the dongle, nothing.   On a small hunch I looked at the cat5 cable connectors to see the wiring and something looked odd, very odd.  The cable between the dongle and the hub was a cross-over cable.  Now if fate would have been such that I used that cable on the ssc and the straight-though cable on the dongle, well lets just say....

So the message I'm trying to convey via this long post is:

CHECK YOUR CABLES!!!! MAKE SURE THEY ARE STRAIGHT-THROUGH!!!        

[RJ]

Yes,

Important lesson for all!

 As I have pointed out more than once, you must use good striaght through cables on the Smart String stuff or you will damage stuff. Just get some stranded premade patch cables and save yourselfs the heartache of trying to use the wrong stuff.

Remember power goes over  these cables and if they are wired wrong it will smoke stuff.

I hope you swapped cables and have lights now?

RJ

[egenoup]

All is good, but I still do not have PC controlled SS blinky...  All cables I used were premade, the crossover came with my wireless router and I did not think to check if it was straight or crossed!  I had another premade straight cable in my car, so I was able to program the SSC.  I am having problems with LSP, so I am in the process of installing vixen 2.1.4.  I'll play more with it tomorrow...

Egenoup

[RJ]

Yeah my post was really geared for everyone else since I know you have under control.  It just reminded me that many take this stuff with a grain of salt until something bad happens and then they are mad. So a reminder was in order. Thanks for the warning.

RJ 

[egenoup]

 

I have SS Blinky with both vixen and LSP..... I don't know about LSP though!!!!  I actually already had vixen installed.  I just dropped the pixelnet plugin and created a 4096 channel sequence in 15 minutes.  With LSP I found out that the problem I had last night was the channel count.  I had started with 76 RGB channels, but it seems like the pixelnet output plugin chocked on it and would not output.  Today I created a new controller with just 8 RGB channels and it all worked as it should.  This leads me to believe that i will be resequencing all my songs to vixen, unless LSP 2.0 is much better and faster (big hopes).  If LSP does not come through, this will be the third time I have to resequence my songs!  First was the original sequences with Aurorashow, then to LSP and now maybe to vixen!

AHHHHHH....  I guess I should probably get started!     

Egenoup