Don Allen

Several suggestions:

Move the wireless transmitter to where it is line of sight of any receivers, some installers set them up in rooms with one or two walls between the transmitter and the receivers, which reduces rf signal strength. Do your units have external antennas ? some receivers are small XLR barrel units with small built in antennas, so have poorer receive performance.

Make sure you turn on the power to the transmitter first, then after about 30 seconds turn on the receivers, This is important as your wireless receivers may be set up in auto mode so they will switch to being a transmitter if they have a DMX input when they are turned on, or If they receive a DMX signal when they are turned on, they switch to being a receiver. If they are are not getting a DMX signal on their DMX input and not receiving a DMX signal, they could randomly become a transmitter and will stay in that mode until they are powered off. Some are auto channel switching to avoid interference so the receivers may not change to the same channel as the transmitter.

I install Chauvet DFI Hub Wireless DMX  in schools where it is too costly to run DMX cables as they have a large antenna, are low cost and can be set to Tx or RX mode on a set channel. 

It is always preferable to run cables if you can. Even top of the range DMX transceivers can be faulty or set up wrong.

Another problem that can occur is when you have different brands of equipment on one DMX cable that are causing DMX corruption. If possible, use a separate DMX splitter output for each brand of equipment. This problem is more prevalent with budget equipment form overseas,

Always terminate your DMX cables, some people don't as it shows up DMX errors due to cable faults, which is what you want to find and eliminate before show time.

You can get RGB W/W C/W LED COB theatre lights. I bought what was advertised as RGBWAL but turned out to be RGBWWCW fixtures. Having WW/CW allows you to set the desired colour temperature.

I have used heat shield between the printed gobo or "Fergusons" as we called them and the light source, usually a 600W Pacific with the lamp pulled down out of focus.. We printed them using an Epson inkjet printer as it gave best results. The ink side has to be on the outside or lens side. No experience with LED's. The heat shield and printed gobo should not be in contact to reduce heat transfer.

I have two Parscan's, a Taskmaster desk and a briefcase controller in my workshop if you want them, just need to sort out freight. Heaviest item is the transformers. David Ashton brought them to Perth, Western Australia but I never got them going fully.

Do you have any Parscan's, Taskmaster or briefcase controller ?

Watch this video The Lighting Design Process by Matt Kizer https://scenicandlighting.com/article/the-lighting-design-process/ as it will give you an idea of basic stage lighting.

A fresnel mounted in front of the stage, in the centre, facing outwards towards the lecturn will light the speaker for everyone to see. Using that angle will keep the light from splilling onto the screen, if there is one. If possible get a fresnel with remote zoom so you can adjust the size of the beam. If your budget is small, the fresnel used by alistermorton will do the job. If you only want to one light, get a small six channel DMX controller https://www.essentialsupplies.co.uk/basic-DMX-controller-6-channel.html .

One point to take into account is that LED fixtures have a power supply, which may have a fan, so there is always a small amount of power always used when they are on.

There were some good spreadsheet calculators put out by suppliers to show how much saving can be made when switching to led fixtures.

Take off the rear focus knob, remove the three very small self tappers that hold the circular plate in place, this gives access to the screw focus shaft, which will slide out the back. Take note of where the spacing washer is on the front of the focus screw, it stops the lamp tray getting too close to the front lens. Clean and use graphite grease or powder for lubrication. You may need to take both out to get the lamp tray assembly out. Loosen the cable gland to allow the mains cable, usually thin black teflon coated, to allow the lamp tray assembly to come out fully.

I used to replace burnt P28S lampholders, but found it just as successful to use a dremel with a wire brush to clean the centre lamp contact, then put contactor oil on it.

The electrolytic capacitors are mounted very close to the transformers for each circuit and dry out, if you have a faulty circuit, probably due to no +5V supply,  replace all of the electrolytic capacitors with high temperature ones.

Circuit for Martin RS485 Optosplitter and pdf manual. It states they work with either polarity pin 2 and pin3.

Circuit.pdf RS485SplitterManual.pdf

Do your power distros have individual RCBO on each channel or do you have three RCBO for the distro, one per phase.

The most common tripping of power distro channels appears to be the leakage of the LED SMPS. You can get away with about ten 200W LED fixtures, for reliability I recommend six. I have a Metrel MI3309BT PAT tester and it can measure leakage current which is a useful feature that not many users make use of. I have started measuring leakage current on LED fixtures to see how they compare.

A 30mA RCBO must not trip at 15mA leakage but must trip at 30mA, a typical value is 20mA leakage. Leakage current is not stated in most light fixture datasheets.

I use a coach bolt which has square sides so it does not turn inside the motor. You may need to use a spacer washer as some of the square shank may stick outside of the motor plate.

Is there a compact, as in 2 mic inputs 2 line outputs interface version of a DX168 for use with a Allen & Heath SQ-6 ? seems an waste to use a DX168 for a lecturn mic and a foldback speaker ?

It would be nice to get a digital DI box to do the job ?

If you don't have any success with etc creating your fixture profile, try the user forums, I found that etc are very slow on ColorSource fixture files.

I used Light factory to control the MHLED200. One of the advantages of Light factory is having drop down menus for attributes such as gobos, as you can add a picture of the gobo on the menu line. I create all of my Light Factory fixture profiles as once you have done your first it is easy and quick. The picture shows one of the shows I used the profiles on, you can see the red striped gobo on the rock wall. The profile is on the roof of the shelter on the right. I have attached the user manual. Just keep asking Grace for help with the lights, they usually like a video of any fault. I always replace Chinese PowerCon cables as they usually get the active and neitral wire colours the wrong way around.

MH_LED_200D.lff MHLED 200D manual new v1_1.pdf

I use this style of LED Moving Head Spot for mirror balls as they can also be used as a gobo spot.120W 8Gobo Stage Spot . They are NOT RGBW as they have a colour wheel. You need to mount the spot at a distance to suit the mirror ball.

A lot of schools that I go to do not bother to turn their LED fixtures off so they run 24/7 without any use of the LED emitters, so the PSU appears to be the weak link.

Another thing to be aware of with outdoor LED use is overheating will damage LED's. Some fixtures have thermal protection built in, so will reduce output power until they cool down. If you are using fixtures without thermal protection, do not use them in direct sunlight on hot days, wait until they are in shade or it is dusk and you will notice them. I am in Perth, Western Australia where we do shows in 40C+ days. You may have concerns for cold weather, such as condensation ?

His pat tester may give a fail indication as the lamp appears open circuit, do you know if it was an earth fail or an insulation fail ? An open circuit lamp gives an insulation fail on my Metrel 3309.

In the current ZerOS 7.13 software, you can create fixtures when you are patching if you cannot find a suitable one, but there are limitations on mode channels. ZerOS Fixture Creator.  I have noticed a lot more activity on the ColourSource Forums where people are helping each other out.

The Coloursource AV has a lot of extra features such as included sound effects and video slides including animated videos such as falling rain, but has 20 or 40 faders. It is a good choice for small schools but has poor support for fixture file requests. There is a monitor output which can be used for lighting OR video effects output, you have to choose your priority. There are no encoder wheels unfortunately. You can use a network setup for a second monitor.

The FLX S24 has the same size internal touch screen as the Colousurce, so I use a laptop as an external monitor. If you have the bench space for a laptop of screen for a desktop pc it makes a big difference. Edward from Varilite now,  FLX S Forum has shown me how to make a multicell fixture profile for me for my FLX S48, so I can hade a 12 channel dimmer rack under one channel fader. I need to do a lot of preprogramming before doing a one day dance concert in a venue that has 204 channels of Jands HPX dimmers. I will record my basic conventional washes as groups for ease of access. I will also be using two LED fixtures under one fader as multicells.

Both desks have offline monitors.

DMX512-A is a communications data protocol DMX 512-A Standard that uses RS485 as it transmission protocol , RS485 Quick Guide  so the limitation of 32 devices is an RS485 limitation. with development of newer RS485 drivers it is possible to have 64 devices on a single line. As Jivemaster points out it depends on the DMX chips and the only way to know that is to physically look inside the box. The cable definitely affects reliability of your RS485 Star Network. 

Always use terminators as it shows up cabling errors.
If using cheap Chinese origin lights, use a separate DMX feed from a splitter for each different model, so if one light goes faulty it does not affect the rest of the rig. I have seen cheap lights decide to become a Master when they go faulty which puts corrupt DMX data o the DMX network.
Stick to 32 devices on one line.

2 hours ago, Jivemaster said:

AFAIK lots depends on the actual DMX chips and the true nature of the DMX cable. It's far better to spilt the desk output into 4/5/6 than to take a used line and try to boost it with any accumulated errors.

The concept of a loop is totally alien to DMX it should be (electrically) a straight line from source(desk or splitter) to the terminator at the end.

The problem always is that we all know a DMX rig that's functioned perfectly for years that actually doesn't comply with the tech spec. I knew a DJ who made his living from it who had a DMX controller and lights but at the top of a Tbar the DMX was all carried in twin flex. Fortunately the total length was about 5 metres and he got away with it.

The Showtec Showmaster 48 Mk1 V4 were used in a lot of schools and amdrams in Perth, WA as they were cheaper than Jands Event desks. These had an IEC socket on the rear panel with an internal relay for switching fog machines. We disabled these sockets as some schools used these sockets as mains inputs, instead of the supplied DC plugpack and if someone pressed the fog button, it went bang !

The Showmaster 48 kill mode  post in 2018 has more details.

50356_Showmaster48_Mk1_V4_ManualE_.pdf

Pixel 1 is next to display.

Well spotted DrV, there was 4 dry joints on the tactile switches which was making mode switching difficult. It also has a 52 channel mode. The 2 channel mode is the same as the Uking ZQ-B354 wall wash bar. The onyx fixture finder did not find any options for the 2 channel mode.

ZQ-B354.pdf