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[Chris Poynter]

Hi everyone,

I am hoping there is someone in here who has experience with the internals of moving heads.

The Context
My mobile DJ set-up is two Chauvet Intimidator Spot 355z IRC moving heads, one ADJ Warlock, and four ADJ Dotz Pars. I have them all on a T-Bar, and I control them with ADJ's myDMX 3.0 software. I use two ADJ WiFly Battery EXR transceivers to control the fixtures wirelessly.

I've been using these fixtures for about two years now, 100+ gigs, without any issues.

The Problem
I had two gigs this weekend, and one of my Intimidator Spot movers started flashing when it should not have been flashing. It was following all my programmed movements / colours / gobos just fine, but the LED was flicking on and off the whole time. The best I can describe it is as a pulse, or a super duper slow strobe.

At my gig on Friday, it seemed to help for a few minutes when I disconnected and reconnected power to the fixture, but then it would eventually revert to the pulsing again.

At my gig on Saturday, it pulsed the whole time, so I ended up turning it off.

The Troubleshooting
I set up my two movers at home today, and put them both into stand-alone mode, not connected to each other or anything else. I just let them run for half an hour and they both worked fine the whole time.

Next, I connected the "good" fixture (by itself) with a short DMX cable, directly to the myDMX dongle, and ran some shows for awhile. Everything was fine.

Then, I connected the "bad" fixture (by itself) with a short DMX cable, directly to the myDMX dongle, and ran some shows for awhile. It did the terrible pulsing thing the entire time.

Lastly, I connected the "good" fixture again (by itself), but changed it's DMX address to the same address as the "bad" fixture, to trick myDMX into thinking it was the "bad" fixture. It still worked fine. So I'm assuming there's nothing wrong with the software, cable, or dongle.

Is some part of the DMX communication within my fixture itself toasted? Does anyone have insight on this?

Thanks so much for your time!

Christopher Poynter
Victoria, BC, Canada
www.chrispoynter.ca

[veditor78]

My guess is it is not a DMX issue at all but a fixture issue. LED driver, most likely. Could be the DMX decoder in the fixture. I'd send it to Chauvet for repair.

[Jeff Lelko]

Hi Chris - it looks like you've done a pretty thorough troubleshooting regiment and I'd agree that this appears to be a fixture issue.  If you're up to it, why not try hooking up both fixtures to your controller and have them both on the same address.  See if the problem happens.  If it does, swap the fixtures (the first one becomes the second, the second becomes the first).  This would possibly help to rule out an issue where one fixture (the "good" fixture) is corrupting the data going to the second fixture (the "bad" fixture).  This is rather unlikely, but I have seen it happen once or twice.  If something needs to go in for repair you want to be sure you send the right unit!  The only reason I suggest this is that the problem doesn't occur when the units are in standalone mode, correct?

Otherwise, I'd pop the unit open, check for loose wires, and dust everything out.  Symptoms such as this can be indicative of both a loose connection somewhere or a situation where your unit is getting too hot.  I'm not sure if these specific lights have an LED-off feature to protect the fixture from overheating, but it's a thought that could explain why you sometimes see the issue right away and sometimes you don't, especially as the problem was starting to happen.  Short of any of this working, unfortunately it's probably time to call Chauvet or your preferred service center and go from there.  Good luck! 

[Rich Grisier]

The only other thing I can think of that hasn't been mentioned is the Channel configurations on the fixtures.  Those movers can be set to 8 or 14 Ch mode.  Make sure they are both on the same mode.  I've done things before where I change the mode for testing, then forget to change it back before powering down.  When it starts acting weird at a gig I hits me that I forgot to set it back to the right Ch mode.

[Paul G. OBrien]

Try your test again with a terminator installed in the fixture, that may help stabilize the signal. If this helps it doesn't rule out there being a problem with the fixture.

[ProSoundWeb Community]