Dimmers Randomly Flashing

Twice in the past couple of months, we have come in to the theatre to discover that all of our lights are on and randomly flashing off occasionally. We've assumed that it could have been due to a power outage, and fixed it by power cycling each of the dimmer packs. But this morning, it happened while a technician was in the building, and just happened again as I was searching the forums for information. There was no power outage, or noticeable surge. It has, so far at least, always happened while the console was powered off.

We have Sensor+ dimmers, running version 2.2.0, with an EOS console connected via a Net3 ACN Gateway.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

sk8rs_dad over 12 years ago

Do you have any devices other than dimmers sharing the DMX? For instance, some LEDs have Master/Slave modes that send DMX when no other source of DMX is present. It can lead to all manner of unexpected behaviour when your dimmers start responding.
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DSchuster over 12 years ago in reply to sk8rs_dad

Thanks for the reply. Because the problem was intermittent, it was hard to troubleshoot. But I kinda figured it out with the help of ETC Support. It was something to do with the Unison system sending crazy info to the DMX B channel, so I have turned off the DMX B input on the Sensor rack for now, and we are having a technician come out to service it soon.
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jhamil over 12 years ago in reply to DSchuster

So what was the actual cause? Inquiring minds like to know.
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DSchuster over 12 years ago in reply to jhamil

We had a service technician come take a look, and it turns out that the wiring in the sensor racks was installed pretty shoddily. One of the wires had come loose, and a dmx end was actually wired backwards. It's a wonder we didn't have issues earlier. But the technician ran a few new lines, cleaned everything up, and works great now.
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