chauvet colordash quad 18 faults

[gnomatron]

I have a couple of Chauvet Colordash quad 18 led lanterns with the same fault - one of the characters on the display (seems to be the 2nd one along) intermittently displays gibberish. It consistently does it when trying to set the DMX address which renders them a bit useless. Has anyone seen this before? Sometimes the display works as it's mean to, so it doesn't seem to be the display itself, but the controls etc. seem to be working fine too.

[litemog]

Sounds very similar to the issue I had with some brand new Colour dash Hex 12 units. The displays displayed total gibberish and rendered the units unusable. Had them repaired under warrenty. I think it's a known issue.

[gnomatron]

These definitely aren't under warranty annoyingly - second hand units. Wonder what the dodgy component is :/

[Brian]

Sounds more software than hardware.

[timsabre]

No I think it will be hardware. The displays are multiplexed from a serial to parallel latch, each digit is lit in turn very rapidly so they look like they are all lit. (i.e. turn on digit 1, send pattern for digit 1, then turn on digit 2, send pattern for digit 2. etc)

If something goes wrong with the common "digit turn on" line then that digit shows the output for all the other digits as well as its own output, which just looks like a garbled pattern. There will be a transistor or fet which turns on each digit, I'd be looking for that. It's all surface mount though so not easy to fix (at least in the ones I've got which aren't chauvet but they all seem to be similar inside).

[gnomatron]

cheers for that...! Sounds a pain to fix... hmm...