irw
Posted: Friday, July 25, 2014 7:18 PM
Joined: 7/5/2014
Posts: 18
Hello,
Might need one of the ETC technical folk to help out with this one- I'll try and explain it as best I can! Not sure whether we've got a couple of coincidental things going on, or just one big odd thing!
Towards the end of our show today, stage management told me they could hear a 'moving light noise' from the rig- this was pinpointed to be my channel 15 (a VL1000 AS), and it appeared to be performing a reset. This appeared to happpen a couple of times before I had a chance to start troubleshooting after the show, although I did start looking closely at my screens. For reference, it would seem that the discharge lamp also extinguished, almost as if the fixture had been power cycled.
Now when it was mentioned to me in the show, I started looking at my screens carefully, and noticed that Position MSpeed for channel 15 was showing as a manual value, with an R in the box, as if I'd changed it with an encoder (it should have been showing the same Preset title that Pan and Tilt were showing. Odd, I thought, and sneaked it back to the cue (Chan [15] {PositionMSpeed} [Sneak] [Enter]. Shortly after this, I saw the value change to a red value again, with the reference mark, and this happened a few more times during the final part of the show.
Now this didn't co-incide with any cue running, I certainly didn't take control from the board, and no-one had control on an iRFR remote. I can't say for definate whether this coincided with the lantern resetting each time. (Although note that the PositionMSpeed channel should only affect Pan & Tilt, and has nothing to do with the 'control' channel). Once the show had finished, and I went to Cue Out, I didn't see it happen again (I left the console on during the get out), which kind of implies it was something in the cue stack, but (a) I can't see anything that adjusts that parameter in the relevant cues, (b) why would it become a manual value? (c)apparently the fixture may have reset itself during the previous night's show as well, which is programmed into a different cue list.
I had a look through the diagnostic screen, and pinpointed a couple of moments when the phantom parameter value change happened, but all I can see in diag is the sneak commands that I issued to the channel after the value went manual. Annoyingly, I didn't think to do an 'About' on the parameter at the time to see the source of the value.
If any ETC eggheads catch this, and (a) understand what I'm trying to explain and (b)would be willing to have a look into it, I saved a copy of the console log files, and also have a copy of the show file to hand.
Thanks,
Ian
Edited to add:
Bear in mind, we're currently running these shows in Rep, and this problem has only started occuring in the past few days, so no programming has been updated (certainly not in my cue list) that may have caused this.
corey @ ETC TS
Posted: Saturday, July 26, 2014 3:05 AM
Joined: 7/4/2014
Posts: 586
Hi Ian - sorry to hear that you had some issues. Can u send a copy of the showfile, the logs, a link to this post
and the time/dTe when the problem occurred to eos (-a-t) etcconnect /dot/ com .
We will have a look if we can see what happened. Thanks!
Gregg
Posted: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 10:19 AM
Joined: 7/4/2014
Posts: 47
I had a similar experience a while back. Watch to see if the encoderer values are changing by themselves, also the affecteed encoder will make some noise, this is an indication of a bad encoder that needs to be replaced. Call our good friends at ETC tech support, they are very helpful in getting things like this fixed.
-Gregg