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    TBS Lighting
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Road Hog 4 & DP-8000 DP Hanging/Disconnecting

I have a customer running a Road Hog 4 and renting a DP-8000 for some extra rental gear. Both are running version 2.1 and the DP-8000 is connected directly to the Road Hog 4.

Normally they are doing 3 universes of DMX and 3 universes of Art-NET out of the Road Hog 4.

For this special show they cloned those 3 DMX universes, their 3 Art-NET universes and then added another 6 universes (a mix of DMX and Art-NET) in the DP-8000.

For rehearsals, their DMX house rig (Universes 1-3) is connected to the Road Hog 4, the rest of the gear connected to the DP-8000 in a mix of DMX and Art-NET gear. The Art-NET is not connected to the Road Hog 4.

They are seeing 2 issues here.

1. The internal DP-8000 Road Hog-4 is sporadically going off-line for a second or two causing output to hang.

2. The external DP-8000 is sporidcially going off-line for a second or two causing the output to hang. The two issues happen at different times.

The client moved all fixtures to the DP-8000 and unpatched the Road Hog 4 universes as a work around. The external DP-8000 seems to stay on-line, but output on the Art-NET is still hanging sporadically.

Anyone have any thoughts on this issue? Thanks for the help in advance.

Travis Slyter
Ruehling Associates, Inc.
  • 0
    Does they have the same fixtures on the internal and external DP, I mean a 1 to 1 copy?
  • 0
    Yes it is a 1:1 copy. They are running the Road Hog for as the DHCP server and Show Server. Directly connected to the external DP-8000. DMX for universes 1-6, Art-NET for 7-12.

    Since removing the Ethernet switch/router they are not seeing the external DP-8000 go OFFLINE in the NETWORK window. They are also not seeing the status and send/receive go out, just seeing some sporadic hangs of attributes on the Art-NET output of the DP-8000.

    Here is some more info.

    1. They changed the Network setting to turn OFF the DHCP and use the default IP settings.

    2. They are running the Art-NET output from the DP-8000 to a switch and then taking 1 universe directly to a Catalyst Media Server and a 4 universes via a PathPort Quatto Art-NET to DMX converter (using POE from the switch) then going DMX to several universes of moving lights.

    3. They Catalyst is not seeing the hang, just the DMX moving lights. However, they use the same set-up for their house system and they have no issues with the PathPort Quattro running DMX fixtures from the Road Hog 4 Art-NET output normally. They are just using the DP-8000 because they are using a lot more rental DMX moving lights for this special show.

    4. They hang occurs when a cue is edited and UPDATE is pressed. The cue is updated but the output to the fixtures is not refreshed and the fixtures won't update to the new information. If BLIND is pressed the fixtures will respond to color/gobo/position changes, but the output to the Art-NET to DMX fixtures is frozen on when that cue is updated. Not seeing the issue on the Catalyst layers.

    5. After the hang occurs, the client logs off the showfile, waits for the DP-8000 to reset and then logs back in to the show. The hang occurs 2 or 3 times when a cue is edited/upated. Upon the 4th log-out/restart the problem seems to disapear for a while.

    6. Customer updated to version 2.1 of software after seeing this problem as it was mentioned as bug fix for version 2.0 in the 2.1 release notes. However, the update had no effect on the issue.

    Thanks.


    Travis Slyter
    Ruehling Associates, Inc.
  • 0
    Is it managed or unmanged switch? 100mbit? Gigabit?
    Any other stuff on this network?

    In Catalyst you have a real good art-net monitor, there you would see if you will loose some artnet packages.

    Have you tried to unpatch the universes that are duplicated? and only use the DP Outputs?
  • 0
    Here is a summary of what the customer experienced. They were able to work around the problem, but perhaps the Blue DP-8000s were not liking the version 2.1 software.

    "Got everything back to my normal set-up and no problems what so ever. (no hang-ups in fixture net directly from Road Hog 4 console running to the switch then to the Pathport Quattro Art-Net to DMX box converter.)

    I did get a chance to turn off universes in fixture net on console with the DP, still got hang-up. I didn't get a chance to unclone universes from console to DP, but only had problems on fixture net side. No problems with universes plugged into front panel of DP. When it did hang-up during editing, you could unblind and it would go to colors\fx that you edited to, but when you would leave editor would go back to colors/fx it was hung up on.

    The Master it was on would also not respond (intensities hung up even when not adjusting them). Only happened on Fixture Net side. Could be blue box versus black box thing. It seemed to happen when the DP warmed up a little too.

    The DP worked fine other than the editing issue."

    So we did not come-up with any solutions. Customer worked around the issue for the show. Just posting this to document what issues we had and what solutions were tried.

    Thanks to everyone for their help.


    Travis Slyter
    Ruehling Associates, Inc.
  • 0
    There is an issue with values staying in the output from an editor even after the editor was closed.
    This bug is logged and solved in 2.1.1
    Maybe they also saw this.
    Workaround: open the cue again and close the editor. This restores the output to normal.
    When this happens you see also in the output window that the values are coming from an editor, although there are no open editors

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