We have a bunch of the ETC SmartBars in one of our black box performance spaces and we recently had a power failure on one of the phases of power coming in to the building. It caused some of the ETC SmartBars to start acting up. Some of the dimmers wouldn't fade up when they came up in a cue, and instead started acting like a non-dim. When I cycled the power on the breaker that fed the three phase circuits in that theater, they all seemed to restore to their original state. It was very odd that only a few of the SmartBars "freaked out" when they all would have lost power.
We also had the Element get a bit confused too, for some reason a handful of the addresses in the patch suddenly had a profile put on the dimmer curve. In the end I wasn't on top of it enough to actually cross reference the dimmers that had the profile curve and the dimmers that hadn't been working properly since cycling power actually resolved most of the problem. I'm wondering if the two were related though. Is it possible that the dimmers sent information back thru the network and somehow forced a profile on to the console?
Thoughts?
Brian Walker
Production Manager
Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston