Anyone seeing issues running a LOR Protocol network in xLights?

[frankr]

Hello all,

My show has been running great for three nights now but there is still some weirdness with xLights that I cannot quite figure out.

I have 4 networks:
Net 1: LOR and D-Light controllers running LOR Protocol for control Unit numbers 5-9 and D0-D9
Net2: Pixelnet 1-3600
Net3: Pixelnet 1-3840
Net4: DMX universe running a renard 64.

All timings, endings and transitions are spot on for nets 2-4. 

On the LOR network I see several weird behaviors. On one song the timing gets so out of sync that the events are occurring in the next 2 sequences (a short THX intto followed by Aly & AJ Little drummer Boy).  At the start of the second sequences there is a sudden burst of events on the LOR controlled channels like they are suddenly catching up...

In addition there seems to be a pattern of channels begin stuck on for the LOR channels.  In fact when the show ended tonight my strobes were still running as well as a few other channels.  This morning when I got up I noticed that a few channels were on as well.  Both conditions were cleared by a simple unplug of the LOR Cat5 cable at my PC.

So I am wondering if anyone else is seeing these issues and if so if they have done some troubleshooting on them.  At this point the data that I have is pretty difficult to narrow in on what the cause might be.

Thanks in Advance,

Frank

[mmais68569]

I to am having a problem with LOR Ch not responding & ghosting. I also had the problem of ch. staying on at the end of a song.
Fix:
Go back to your sequence & make sure that you have nothing programmed for the last sec. This corrected that problem for me.

            Mike

[dowdybrown]

What baud rate is your lor network set at? Unless you are using lor's wireless light linkers, the baud rate should be 57600.

Matt

[dowdybrown]

Your problem is almost certainly bandwidth saturation. 240 channels is a lot for an lor network. The lor software can drive that many successfully because it optimizes commands (eg. if several channels on a controller are doing the same thing, it can send a single command to control all of them). xLights doesn't do any such optimization, it sends a seperate command for every channel.

I would recommend moving your lor controllers to your dmx network as a start.

Matt

[frankr]

Thanks Matt,

Moving to DMX for my LOR is impractical for this season.

Would splitting my LOR network in half and addign a new LOR network seem reasonable?  That should be pretty simple for me to do.

Frank

[dmoore]

For those that are following along, this primer on DMX vs LOR protocols explains why the LOR protocol can become "congested". 

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[taybrynn]

It wasn't working for me today, but I just figure out why some of the controllers were NOT working.

xlights wants to use sequential unit #'s in LOR ... so since I had my controllers numbered as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 ... it
actually wanted it to be 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0A,0B,0C,0D instead.  I reprogrammed the addresses (in the field, wired up) using the LOR
hardware utility, then went into LOR Sequencer and changed my 2011 config ... and used the 'change controller' option under the 'channel configuration' utility.  That changed all of the controller assignments for me.  Then export 2011 config, then imported into test sequence ... then went back into xlights and it worked flawlessly.  This is a sequence with 272 LOR channels and 4096 pixelnet (PN) channels, but none of the PN channels are sequenced yet, just playing a sequence from LOR S3 converted to my 2011 config file.

Wow, I thought something was broken, because the first 9 controllers worked, but the rest did not.  This explains why.  xlights was sending the signal to the wrong unit #'s and I just didn't know it.

[mmais68569]

Matt

Here is how I am running my show with xlights
Pc -----> Lynx Dongle-------> Lynx TX wireless Transmitter -------> 5 LOR controllers -----> Rainbow Brain---->

2 Lynx Express.

One problem with channel not responding is on the second LOR controller & the other is on the first Express. I have checked the programing & the electrical connections both are good. The other problem with ghosting shows up on my second express this is also the last controller in my show.
As you see I am only running 1 dongle for the whole show. If I was to add a second Dongle & use it for just my LOR & set the Bard rate at 57600 do you think that may solve the problem. Also how would you set up a network in xLights using the above diagram. I have mine set as a DMX network & with doing that Bard rate can not be changed.

             Thanks for any & all help.
                   Mike

[frankr]

So I have far less then 240 channels.  I have 15 controllers and 8 of them are 8ch units.  I have also moved things so that unit numbers are 1-F.

So far still having issues.

Next step is to split my LOR network into two segments.

Fingers crossed.

[taybrynn]

I have all my LOR controllers on "Regular" network and the new pixelnet universe on "Aux A" network.

In the Aux A network, you start over at 1 and go up to 4096, mapping everything out as a 16ch controller in LOR.

If you use on the same network, I think thats likely the problem?

[frankr]

thanks but I have 4 networks marked 0-3 (which is regular - Aux 'C').  The three other networks work fine.  It is only the Lor netork that is giving me grief.

I know that I do not have channels duplicated in my sequences.  So my issue is pretty much isolated to either the network and cables or the protocol or the hardware.

[taybrynn]

I bet its the fact those are 8 channel units and xlights only deals with 16ch units.

[frankr]

From reading the code xLights really does not care about the number of channels per unit.  The LOR addressing scheme appears to be what cares.  I.e. in the version of the LOR addressing that Matt has implemented there are 8 bits for controller id and 4 bits for circuit ID.   The math should work fine whether or not you use only 8 or all 16 channels per controller.

The only place the 16 circuit thing comes into play is in how it calculates the channel ID because it does not store things in Unit:circuit it just stores them as channels.  All the channels work fine through testing so I know I can address things.

I am willing to bet that your issue was probably due to you setting last channel equal to the number of channels you have rather than setting it to the highest number channel you had based on the equation:

last channel=(last unit ID)*16

It is not really clear that this is how to set that value but I have diagnosed this issue for a few users so it does appear to be a common misconception.



When reading the sequence in xLiughts will truncate any channel past "last channel".

[frankr]

For anyone following along here is the update.

So yesterday I crawled through my yard and made a bunch of changes. I separated my D-light controllers from my LOR controllers so that network 1 became all D-light units 1-4 and 0A-0F.  My LOR controllers then became network 5 units 5-9.  During the process LOR controller 6 appears to have gone of the reservation on me.  The LOR Hardware utility did not discover it and all the lights attached to it stayed on 100% of the time.

So I broke out a Lynx Express that I had not finished (in case but no cords attached) and prepped it for replacement. My plan was to hang this off of my SS HUB on DMX 8 and use it to replace the LOR controller.  This would mean the least cables to run given proximity of the controller to my SS HUB.

So I got everything wired up and went out to deploy. I quickly discovered that DMX did not want to come out of my hub... So I tried the other SS HUB. Same result.   

I took one of the hubs out of its box and brought it in to the PC. I checked the checksum and lo and behold it was not the same as the checksum in teh wiki. Reprogrammed, redeploy, BOOM DMX is coming out of my hub 

I then updated all my sequences doing some search and replace in the XML and ran them all through the most recent version of xLights converter and ran the show last night.

The BEST my show has looked so far this year!  I am pretty sure that xLights had nothing to do with the issues I had.  I think it is likely that bad LOR controller fritzing and adding noise to the network or a bad cat5 cable on the connection to that unit adding noise.  In any event I am finally happy with my show and hope to get some videos tonight.

Frank

[frankr]

One other thing.... I did switch one of my songs from 192Kbps to 128... All my other songs were in 128Kbps already and the 192 one was the one that had LOR events appearing in later sequences.  Given all the changes I made yesterday I can not discern if this mattered or not but wanted to throw it out there (if nothing else just so that I remember this next year...)