timsabre

Yes, that's true, we have fibre all the way from the premises to the exchange here rather than local cabinets and you would hope that that the exchange will keep running for a bit. But I think the telecoms in this area is quite unusual due to the single local provider KCOM.

A lot of burglar / fire alarms now use a cellular data connection for alarm reporting rather than a landline. VOIP does not necessarily fail with power outage, if IP phones are powered over their ethernet connections then a strategically placed UPS to run the internet router and the PoE switch is all that's needed to keep it all going in a power fail. Of course this does require a certain amount of pre-planning.

Is it just my X32 that has this insertion speed problem then? I have a bunch of 16GB sticks which work fine on a PC but only work on the X32 if you insert them slowly. Maybe they have fixed the problem in more recent hardware.

Bizarrely it is all to do with how quickly you plug them into the x32. If you ram them in quickly a lot of usb sticks don't work. If you slowly slide them in then they work. Sounds strange but I have found it works for me. It's something to do with getting the stick powered up before the x32 firmware tries to connect - the power / ground makes contact slightly before the usb +/- so if you go slowly the stick gets a bit more time to initialize.

Is that 14.4W per metre? How many LEDs per metre - it's normally 30 or 60. If 60 LEDs per metre then it takes 1.2 amps per colour for each metre of tape (which is 14.4W per colour). If you mix a colour using more than one of R/G/B/W then obviously the current demanded from the power supply goes up, but the current per channel on the driver doesn't. In other words with your 3A per channel driver, you could only run about 2.5 metres of tape per output.

BMD seem determined to make things as small as possible with no regard for cooling. I had an Atem-1me (the old thin design) go up in smoke in the middle of an event. We had a fan blowing onto it, it ran so hot. The new rack version goes the other way and contains so many fans you need to have it in another room.

Vertical fogger (like a co2 jet simulation) can work for this, I've used them for panto entrances. For example Chauvet Geyser. They make quite a dramatic whoosh noise as well which helps with the effect.

I doubt you will be able to see any difference unless you do extremely slow movements. Even then maybe not.

Digressing from the original question but did you drive your tape data at 3.3v from the esp? I've had some flickery troubles and had to put in a 3.3 to 5v level shifter but it might be the particular tape or psu.

If I understand correctly he's got all 24 channels stuck on though and has identified the control module is at fault, which sounds about right if all the channels are on. Have you tried contacting JB systems for help, they're based in Belgium https://jb-systems.eu/aboutus/

When you are 17 you haven't seen enough things go wrong to appreciate the level of risk. I can think of plenty things I did at that age... Fortunately nothing went wrong.

Also S4 has a dichroic reflector which removes a lot of the infrared / heat from the light beam so it's kinder to glass gobos than a cantata. As Gyro says the peaking control on the S4 can make a massive difference to brightness. And you need to put a glass gobo in the right way round with the pattern side towards the lamp if I remember correctly, otherwise they are likely to crack. You probably already know all this, sometimes glass gobos do crack for no apparent reason. I was doing the launch ceremony for Hull's 2017 City of culture bid and the organisers had splashed out for a colour glass gobo (just the one) to shine onto City Hall for the event which local BBC were carrying live. It cracked and partially fell out of the holder about 2 minutes before event start, very embarrassing.

Found it - R246 (emitter resistor on the positive driver transistor) was 50K instead of 6.8R. What a carry on to find it though.

Thanks Kevin, yes the mod was the one where the legs on the part snap. I didn't think it was likely to be that but it seemed like the first thing to try. I might try changing some of the 1N4148's next. The resistors all meter out OK. I have the rear DIP ribbon disconnected at the moment as it's easier to work on and it makes no difference to this fault.

Ah OK. I am not sure what I was using then, they were RGBW and you could tell.

Colorsource are RGBW aren't they - how do they work out doing white/tungsten output? I've used some colorsource S4's and they looked a bit "LED" in white, couldn't get them looking quite right.

I've used the Chauvet Ovation FC profiles (S4 JR type fixture) with RGBAL emitters and the light output was good - I would have been hard pressed to tell it wasn't a tungsten fixture. I haven't used the Ovation FC Fresnel but I think it is the same LED engine so it should be a nice fixture. Manufacturers are extremely keen to sell stuff at the moment - I would identify a few likely candidates in your price range and contact the distributors who I am sure will be happy to arrange a demo for you. That's the best way to see if it'll work for you.

So this is a very technical question but I know some of you do electronics repairs. I offered to fix a QSC RMX1450a amp thinking it was something simple but it's got me baffled. Symptom is clip light for R channel comes on about 2 sec after power up and remains on with no signal. The channel does output sound but very "thin" and distorted. Amp was completely caked with dirt, it's run 24/7 for 10 years in a school with no maintenance. However after cleaning up the PCB's look OK, nothing obviously failed or overheated and no corrosion or anything. http://sabretechnology.co.uk/downloads/rmx1450.png (full schematics here) On poking around the circuit, the +15V rail on the R channel is low (about 10V) with an AC ripple on it. -15V is OK. Main rails are OK. The output of U201 op-amp to the driver transistors has a large spiky 50Hz signal on it which I think is coming from the +15V noise on one end of voltage divider R218/R219. This is the cause of the clip light but the difficulty is working out what is a cause and what is a symptom. The +15 rail is fed by R235/D212 when the amp is quiescent and R257/D216 when there is audio running. Both those 2 resistors are intact and the correct resistance. The C212 smoothing cap for +15V is OK. It looks like something is loading down the rail but it is difficult to know how to find it. It is a slightly mind boggling circuit because it has all the driver transistor collectors grounded to the heatsinks and it uses a non-grounded power supply so it can basically swing the power supply rails about to generate the output. There is a service manual PDF available here which helpfully explains how the circuit works but the fault finding does not cover this situation. There's a recall for this amp with exactly this symptom, where you have to replace transistor Q205 but I have done this and it does not change the fault. Do any of the electronics experts have any ideas?

A hint on your budget would be helpful. There is a vast range of quality and corresponding price. The more expensive ones have more LED colours than just RGBW or RGBA to give better colour rendering - often adding Lime emitters which help with flesh tones. With RGBW or RGBA it is difficult to get a realistic looking white or pale tints. The ETC Desire Fresnel is probably top of the tree for quality and price, or ETC do a fresnel body for the Source 4 Lustr LED engines.In the mid range you have Elation, Chauvet professional and eLumen8. Down at the bottom end of the budget there is LEDJ and ADJ.

Apparently it's commonly known as "truck board" as it's used for the floor of box truck bodies. Although I'd never heard it called that.

The surface coating is normally phenolic resin so resistant to most solvents. You can buy the sheets of ply to resurface and it is not a difficult job, google for "phenolic ply hexagon" comes up with some things that look like your photo. eg https://www.jastimber.co.uk/18mm-brown-wagonboard-birch-plywood £75.50 per sheet

I'm not familiar with that exact machine but air pumps normally use a vibrating flap mechanism that would act as a non return valve if there was pressure on the outlet of the pump. Sounds like this has probably disintegrated and a new air pump would fix it. If you close off the air pump pipe into the block, does it emit smoke then? Obviously it won't be "haze" as it relies on the air throughput to thin out the smoke, but that would at least let you check the heater block is working properly.

One of the other problems with some dimmers set to switch mode is current leakage when "off" through the suppression components which can be enough to intermittently power up intelligent fixtures (eg led pars). So you get a repeating flash. Does LD90 get round this?

Are you sure the bar load rating is 20kg per metre? Seems very small - if the load at a mounting point is 30kg then the max bar loading would be 60kg between two points

As Jon said above, speed test doesn't tell the full story for video streaming. Using O2 we were getting a good reading for upload speed on speedtest but for whatever reason it could not sustain a video stream.