timsabre

Which ones are you looking at, just out of interest, as this is something I was thinking about too. For brightness comparisons, I have done building uplighting with the Smartbat+ quite a lot on pro gigs which is 4x 8W (RGBW) and IP rated but way above your price range, they stand up well against normal ambient lighting levels so I would say look in the 32W output range. At the price point you are considering, the LEDJ QB1 is 4x8W battery and is around £200 so that would be a good option. But it's not IP rated so depends if you'd ever want to use outside. Considering it's budget kit I have found the LEDJ stuff to be quite resilient and also you can get spares for it.

XR18 used as a 16-input soundcard to a PC would definitely be a cost effective way of doing this. Note that XR16 does not offer the multitrack USB soundcard facility that the XR18 does, it just appears as a standard stereo source over USB.

Interesting, I had no idea something like that existed.

I don't think the audio part is possible either, Tecpro (and all other similar analog comms) is a party-line audio system where a balun circuit is used at each station to both listen from and send to a single (unbalanced) audio line. I don't think that can be done with Dante. If one end only needs to listen you could take the audio from pin 3 of the comms circuit, digitise it then extract it at the other end, but they wouldn't be able to talk back. As you suggest, if you cannot run a 2 core screened cable for some reason then something like Green Go or Riedel over IP would be the way you would need to do it.

I think the metal click disc is an integral part of the switch and you will need to replace the switch body. It looks like the top plastic part of the switch has cracked off releasing the metal bit.

I'm sure we've all had events where a previously undetected gremlin pops up at showtime. Or, there were several problems in setup and you ran out of time to fix them all. Or you thought you'd fixed it but it turns out you hadn't.

Whoa David, it's just a conversational chat, nobody's attacking anyone's work. We all have glitches on our jobs sometimes and all he is saying is it's reassuring to know that big events have the same problems as small events. This forum will end up with no content at all if people don't post a bit of chat to discuss.

For simple shapes I like SCAD, it's a bit different to the others because you define the object mathematically (i.e. I'll have a cuboid size xyz then cut out a cylinder radius r height h). if you have a mathematical or computing background it's quick to use. It's not very good for organic shapes or curvy things. But objects with a lot of repeated similar shapes are easy because you just put a loop in to create the elements.

Paul's approach is pretty much how I run my business but you still sometimes get the nightmare jobs that sounded like fun in the first place but then go downhill rapidly for varying reasons. I don't feel I can walk away from a job having accepted it so there's no escape then until you get to the end!

As suggested, ring up Jem service on the phone, you get to talk to people who know everything about the machines and they'll quickly tell you what is needed.

In my experience LED lighting is quite prone to total or partial failures, but fading/loss of brightness is not noticeable for basic lighting. The place where you notice it is if you are mixing particular colours with fixtures of different age ... e.g. if you mix a deep purple with lots of blue and a little bit of red, an old fixture will have lost a bit of brightness on the red so the purple will look a different colour compared to a new fixture. But if you have fixtures of different brands (or even different batches of the same brand) they are different anyway so really, it's not much of an issue. For typical basic use e.g. white or saturated colours, you will not notice it. My advice would be to buy fixtures from known brands because you will be able to get spares then when the inevitable failures occur. I've got some cheapy LEDJ fixtures and have had a couple of power supply module failures but a quick call to the UK distributor Prolight has had replacement parts in a couple of days. So what recent experience have you had?

It almost certainly is the microcontroller if there's power but it's not doing anything. If you have an oscilloscope you could check the crystal oscillator on pins 18-19, I have known these fail due to bad crystal. But as it started with a dnx meltdown it's likely that fried the microcontroller too.

The microcontroller has its software internally on Flash, you'd need to get the right chip to match your unit. The ADJ one may or may not be the same...

No I meant I could not see the board ident number on the photos. It'll be an 80C52 or similar, these controllers are all modifications of a scanner controller I designed for Abstract in the late 1990s.

I mean the 40 pin microcontroller - I can't see the part number

If the micro has +5V to it, then the most likely thing is the micro has been zapped by whatever fault took out the 75176 (sounds like high voltage on the DMX line). I recommend you invest in an optoisolated DMX splitter to protect against this sort of thing....

Yes... (will attempt drawing) Loop 1 pin 2 -----|>|-------| O -------- pin 2 to beltpack Loop 2 pin 2 -----|>|-------|

This is a difficult modification - your 2 challenges are optical, as the optical system is designed for a point-source arc lamp not a larger LED array, and thermal as you must get the heat away from the LED or it will have a short life. It is not just a case of bolting an LED in place of the lamp. See gyro gearloose's post at the top of this thread - he said "The other problem with Mac 600s is that the original discharge lamp uses a huge heatsink that gets in the way of fitting the LED and it’s own heatsink. I’m not sure how you could use the existing heatsink to cool the LED as you would need to mount the LED somewhere near to the focal point of the reflector otherwise you risk losing a lot of light output. You could remove the existing reflector and use the LED/holder/reflector optics that I mentioned in my post from last year, but fitting them in the Martin heatsink might be tricky."

You can nearly always find one that someone else has made, that works with your device. 2 useful websites for finding matching fixtures are: Avolites fixture finder (https://www.avolites.de/downloads/d4find/) Onyx fixture finder (https://onyxfixturefinder.com/) Basically you tell it what parameters are on each DMX slot and it shows you all the other fixtures that match your one. They both show links to libraries for the particular console (Avolites / Obsidian) but it's not too hard to use the info to find a matching fixture in other libraries.

The diagram you linked to at the top was for connecting 2 single channel beltpacks to dual channel loop wiring which is the opposite of what you want to do. To connect a dual channel beltpack to 2x single channel loops, which I think is what you are wanting, you need to take power (pin2) from only one of the single chan systems, otherwise you link the power supplies together and this will cause bother as you experienced. You need to wire as Sunray's top picture (ignoring the 3rd XLR3 connector). (If you need to get power from either of the single channel loops, you can use 1n4001 diodes to link the power together from the 2 loops)

As Dave suggests Cat5 cabling is not as robust as DMX cabling using XLR connectors. If this is a rig that only gets changed infrequently then should be fine. If it's in and out every day then personally I would avoid using Cat5 with XLR adaptors as you'll get faults due to bad connections or broken conductors. (I'm assuming you have normal network-style Cat5 cable and not tour grade Cat5 with ethercon connectors. That would be a different answer)

The Jem/Martin smoke machines are usually robust. Still built in the same Jem factory in Lincolnshire despite the Martin/Harman takeover. I wonder, would they really be better with a good hazer - can give a much more consistent "club atmosphere".

My android tablet runs down faster than it can charge when running mixing station so a charger / usb power bank is no help if it's got low battery. I think it's time to get on ebay for a more recent tablet maybe!

Sounds like a good plan. I've never needed wired backup in the 5yrs we've been using a tablet for control. Had a couple of mysterious "loss of connection" incidents both of which fortunately happened before the church service started.

I use an ancient Lenovo tablet with XR16 + Mixing station and it works fine with little change from standard Android settings. Mixing station has its own settings for screen timeout etc so you don't need to change any of that in Android. Creating a google account for it is a good idea otherwise you can get notifications from your normal google account (even after you spend ages trying to switch them all off). Make sure you remember to charge it up before you need it... have Mixing Station installed on a backup device just in case - I had a few bad days where I found out too late that it has failed to charge and had to mix on my phone. How are you doing the wifi for the XR12? The unit's inbuilt wifi can struggle in a room with a lot of people, an external wireless access point can be better. Hide the SSID on the AP so that everyone's phones aren't polling it all the time.