Greetings!
We rented an ETC ColorSource 40 AV from a local supplier to see if it would be a suitable replacement for our old ETC board (I don't remember what it was). However, we noticed if we left the board on for a long period of time (2+ hours), we would start to see several of our lights briefly flash the color red.
A bit about our setup:
I am a volunteer and know enough to get my hands dirty making cables and the basics of DMX, although I've never had to do advanced troubleshooting using a DMX reader. I mapped all of our lights into the Light board.
"Group A": 3 similar lights: (will fill in information when I can)
"Group B": 2 similar lights: (will fill in information when I can)
"Group C, D": No issues that I can tell. If they are flashing red, they are being drowned out by the other lights.
When these flashes occur, there are no visible power surges and the light board is on a surge-protector.
All lights - even the ones I haven't mentioned are daisy chained to each other, with a terminator at the end of the chain. All lights are on 1 Universe.
Light-board is located at the back of the church. There may be a mix of DMX cable and Microphone cable in the daisy chain. There is a terminator at the end of the chain, but I don't know anything about it. I've been encouraging the powers-that-be to replace all the cable with proper DMX cable, but there are 2 soft-blocks:
1) Cost. This is always a factor, but especially on a tight-budget.
2) I can't pin this issue down to a cabling problem. If I can, allocating budget towards this would be justifiable. If this is a cabling/terminator issue, an example or explanation from your experience that I can bring before the leadership would be most welcome. :)
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Either Group A or Group B OR both groups will flash all-red briefly. With an Interval between 1 and 4 minutes between flashes (with some variance). This is occurring during live church services and has caused us to at least at one point, kill all lights. We noticed that the issue would appear faster if we left the console "off" but still had the power plugged in.
To temporarily resolve, we power-down the console, unplug the power cord, then plug it back in and turn it on. This resolves the problem for about an hour or two, then the problem returns. I have tried different DMX speeds as well, but none seem to have any affect on the issue. Powering down the console without removing the power cord makes the problem come back faster.
This behavior was not present at all on our old light board, which worked flawlessly, but wasn't really made for Color LED lights. So we figured it was the rental board itself as all of the DMX issues I've seen or read about mention nothing of experiencing the same specific glitch on multiple lights that are resolved with restarting the Light Board.
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We suspected the issue may have been with the board, so we decided to purchase the same model board from the local company as we really do like the ColorSource 40 AV. Much to our dismay, we are experiencing the same exact issue. The above steps to temporarily resolve the problem work. I scrounged the Internet for similar problems, but I'm not really finding anything quite like what I'm seeing.
Any ideas? Need more information? Feel free to ask "stupid" questions too - I'll answer everything as best as I can and will get further information as fast as I can.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts!
