Automated Fixtures Strange I-Cue Problem

[Smatticus]

I am doing a production of Les Miserables this weekend and had a very strange problem with one of my two I-cues at Friday night's performance. Some background on the setup; ETC Express 48/96, 5-pin data cable from 2nd universe output to a Doug-Fleenor DMX splitter, 5-pin data cable to the LX1 I-cue (changing to 4 pin through the power supply), 4-pin data cable from the I-cue to a DMX iris. I used the Fixture Patch to setup the I-cue in the Express (16 bit, 4 channels) and recorded Focus Points for all of the DMX iris and I-cue positions. I referenced the Focus Points in the cues so I could easily make a change to the Focus Points and update the cues. I did all my cue recording and everything was working great all the way up to Friday night.

During the show I noticed that the LX1 I-cue was panned much further stage right than it should have been. As the show progressed I realized that this was occurring in every cue that it was used. The LX1 I-cue was not reaching the actual locations on the stage it was supposed to, it was continually panned too far stage right and too far down stage.

My first thought, naturally, was that the instrument had been moved while I was working with the first electric; checked that during intermission, the instrument had definitely not moved. My next thought was that, in some impossible way, all my Focus Point values for that I-cue had changed. I compared the Focus Point values to a previous save of the show and they were all identical, as they should be. My last thought was that maybe not using a DMX terminator was causing some kind of problem, so I added a four-pin terminator to the end of the chain; that made no difference either. I had not changed any settings on the I-cue since I first configured it for the show. I checked the settings again and they all seemed to be exactly as I had first configured it. Yesterday I ended up just re-recording the Focus Points and during last night's show the I-cue had no trouble hitting all its locations.

Any ideas what could cause an I-cue to exhibit this behavior?

 

[Footer]

This does not sound like a DMX issue. Usually DMX issues involve stutters and jerks in the fixture itself.

When you 50/50 the fixture, does it 50/50 correctly? Sounds to be that the calibration of the unit got off. I would check it during its power up "homing" and see if it indeed does got to 50/50 correctly.

 

[wolf825]

If this has not happened before when you have used this--what has changed this time around in this configuration? Also--did I read your description correct "5-pin data cable to the LX1 I-cue (changing to 4 pin through the power supply), 4-pin data cable from the I-cue to a DMX iris.". ??

So just a guess....you are running the DMX data FROM the ICUE and INTO the DMXIris? The DMX Iris--I dont' know of that being 4pin/powered--I understood it was a regular non-dim and a data line....but if I am incorrect with your model please disregard the rest. I understood the Rosco DMX Iris was 5pin too. Also--is the DMX Iris terminated in the chain? If this is the first time you have run these two items together--try isolating them and see how they respond. If I recall the 4pin for the for the ICUE supplies 24v DC power as well as signal....that could be feeding back your DMX values and tossing things off when it hits the iris... Anything else in the chain? While this could be a calibration it could be a DMX resolution value or profile...


Based on what you wrote for your set up--my best guess without seeing: it sounds to me like there is possibly some miscaibration as Footer suggests from when you originally made your focus points--OR--possibly your DMX value or resolution is getting skewed by something else in its signal path chain that is making "A value" be read as "Aa value" or something just slightly off...

So--IMO--work backwards and troubleshoot the chain and see if anything resolves it... Start with removing new equipment or terminating the DMX Iris and see if that resolves..check your cables...if not then change or check the DMX resolution and if its profiled correctly in the console. The ICUE I think are either 2 or 4 channels of DMX for its resolution control (8bit or 16bit) and it also displays the Signal quality/strength on one of the display windows--check that one out and see what it reads. Did you have to modify up a profile for your patch?

There are a number of possibilities to break down here...could you provide more info?



-w

 

[coldnorth57]

Yeah Wolf is right,
I am running I-cues and the DMX iris (4 of them). the I-cues run off of the power supply unit with 4 pins and dasy chain the I-cues and the last one in the chain gose back to the power supply. For the Iris they come off the the dmx splitter with a run of 5 pin dmx that runs to the frist DMX iris, dasy chain all of them together

 

[xander]

There are many different brands and models of Irises. Just because your Iris runs off 5-pin doesn't mean his does. It would be safe to assume that he didn't somehow plug a 4-pin cable into a 5-pin receptacle on the unit. There are DMX Irises out there that use 4-pin, Apollo EZ Iris being one of them, and I have personally used the same setup as our OP. You do have to be careful that you use the correct PSU because not all are wired the same, some put power on different pins which can lead to not so good consequences. However, that would not lead to the problems you are seeing, it more likely not work at all and there might be smoke involved.

Is the problem consistent and repeatable during the show? What happens outside of the show if you just send the I-Cue to the FP? Does it hit it's target? If the focus point is accurate, but it never hits it during the show, I would assume it is a problem in the cuing. Maybe the cue isn't finishing? Maybe it is getting an instruction from something else you don't realize? Etc, etc.

-Tim

 

[coldnorth57]

I am sorry but i thought that I was using the BRAND name but if not the ones i am running are ROSCO DMX IRIS that is what they are called and they are 5 pin. I guess what i am saying is that I found to run the I-cue and the Rosco DMX IRIS i had to run two seprate lines of dmx one from the power suppy and one from the the splitter. found that the I-cues did not like they power going through the ROSCO DMX IRIS that is how i got them to work.....and you have to bring the dmx output from the last I-CUE back to the power supply that is in the manual

 

[MNBallet]

Yea, I've had some problems like this before. I had 2 I-cues and one Meteor Ellipscan all daisy chained and found out that the I-cues did not like having other DMX toys on the line. Once I split them my probelms went away. Some toys don't like to play with others. It sucks, but a good DMX splitter and extra cable are way cheaper than the headache of DMX toys misbehaving.

a good rule to follow is if you have DMX toys that use the 4 pins is to keep them by themself. Any short in the line and that power feed can fry a circuit or chip on another DMX toy. It happend to me and fried a chip in my Ellipscan. It was easy to replace...but still. what's that saying? and ounce of prevention.....

Did your problems happen when the Iris was in the same DMX line, or when they had their own line?

Kenneth Pogin
Production / Tour Manager
Minnesota Ballet

 

[Smatticus]

To Footer; I am not sure what you mean by 50/50 the I-Cue. When I powered up the I-Cue in question it panned and tilted all the way to one corner (all the way SR and US) just as the other I-Cue did. I never saw either of my I-Cues move the mirror to 50% pan and 50% tilt during the homing process, as far as I could tell they would immediately pan and tilt all the way into one corner. They both made some jittering noises during this homing process but I have never seen an I-Cue not do that during homing.

To Wolf825; I was not referring to a brand name on the DMX iris. I was using City Theatrical DMX irises, that have 4-pin data in and out. The first device on the DMX chain was the I-Cue, the second and last device was the iris. This configuration did not change at all prior to the problem arising. The instrument position and I-Cue settings also did not change at all prior to the problem arising.

At this point I can't resolve the problem because the production is already over and the equipment is on its way back to the rental house. I used the standard 4-channel, 16-bit personality available from ETC for the Express. Even though I was using the 4 channel personality I never really touched the pan-fine (2nd) and tilt-fine (4th) channels. When I did it really didn't seem to have a visible effect on the I-Cue. I found in the past that if I do not use the 4-channel configuration the I-Cue can jitter around during a slow cue fade. For those familiar with the I-Cue settings I was using the following; At0 (DMX Mode), rn1 (16-Bit resolution), Pn0 (Normal pan), tL0 (Normal tilt), dP0 (Display off), as well as the appropriate starting channel.

On the subject of termination, I originally did not have a terminator on the chain but when I added one it made no difference. I am skeptical that a cable could have suddenly become a problem when everything was working perfectly fine for five days before the problem surfaced. Having so little time to come up with a solution I did not check the DMX signal strength on the I-Cue. Fortunately, this I-Cue was the least used of the two and I could relatively easily re-record my focus points.

To xander; When I called up the focus point outside of the show the I-Cue was as far off its target as it was during the show. I am sure that it wasn't a cue-related issue. I compared the focus point intensities from the latest show file to one from a couple days prior and the intensities were exactly the same, so I know there was not a change in the programming of the console.

To MNBallet; The iris was always in the same chain as the I-Cue, and always the last device. The I-Cue and the iris were the only two devices in the chain. I had no problems for five days of cueing and dress rehearsal. This problem surfaced the day of the first performance. I am not very familiar with other ways of splitting data and providing power to I-Cues. The power supply I was using was one that I have used in the past, it is in-line and has 5-pin input and 4-pin output to the I-Cue. It would not have been possible for me to do a return line in my configuration because of this in-line type power supply. I also could not have isolated the iris on its own chain unless I had a separate in-line type power supply for the iris itself, then I would have had two 5-pin DMX cables going to the same location on the same electric. This also would have doubled the number of outputs I needed from my splitter. Perhaps in the future I should use some kind of centralized 4-pin power supply? Such a power supply would also allow me to have return lines back to the power supply? Would a power supply like this also act as a DMX splitter, having its own 5-pin data input that is split to all the different devices it is sending power to?

 

[sk8rsdad]

The problem described is a mismatch between the value being sent by the console, and the positioning of the mirror. This misalignment may have been introduced either during the initial programming or during the performance. There is no way to tell, at this point, which of these hypotheses are the cause of your problem:

1. The mirror was not properly homed during programming: Recording values based on an improper home position will not play back correctly after the fixture is re-calibrated/re-homed. (I believe Footer is using the terms home and 50/50 interchangeably). Since you had good results for 5 days and bad results on 1 day, this likely isn't the case, unless you never had a power reset
2. The mirror home calibration slipped during the performance: I don't believe the I-Cue has any positional feedback, relying on initial calibration (that jittering noise) to synchronize the stepper motors with the position of the mirror. Any mechanical interference with the mirror after initial calibration can wreck the calibration. Maybe a power problem (brownout) could cause misalignment but, based on your description, I too am skeptical of an electrical problem involving cabling. Being able to reset the fixtures remotely can clear up this sort of error, assuming there's a point in the show where it is convenient to do so.
3. The instrument was physically misaligned at some point between programming and performance. If the the fixture moves, its home position points somewhere other than where it did during programming. Obvious, but easy to overlook.

 

[xander]

To xander; When I called up the focus point outside of the show the I-Cue was as far off its target as it was during the show. I am sure that it wasn't a cue-related issue. I compared the focus point intensities from the latest show file to one from a couple days prior and the intensities were exactly the same, so I know there was not a change in the programming of the console.

If it is true that when you call up the FP outside of the show it is off too, it sounds like the instrument just moved? How can you be so sure that the instrument didn't move if the mirror is always off by the same amount? It could also be a misalignment issue, like others have said, but the instrument just moving slightly is far more probable.

 

[Smatticus]

Those all seem like the most plausible possibilities. The home being off during recording makes sense except, as you said, for the fact that the I-cue was powered on and off several times between recording and the performance. After the performance I did try a power off and back on and the problem persisted. I don't know about the calibration slipping. If powering off and back on would clear that up it obviously didn't work when I did that after the performance. On the instrument being physically misaligned; I know the instrument was positioned properly during the Thursday night dress rehearsal; the I-cue hit its marks fine. The electric was flown in a couple times Friday while I was adding some strobe lights to it, but I never touched the instrument with the I-cue. On Saturday when I came in early to diagnose the problem I brought the electric in and checked the instrument with the I-cue; there was absolutely no play in any direction, it was locked down tight. If anything had bumped the instrument there would have been some play in some direction.

On another note; it did not seem like the mirror position, once the problem arose, was off by a consistent, say, 10% in pan and 14% in tilt, in every focus point. When I re-recorded the focus points I wasn't changing the pan and tilt intensities in every focus point by the exact same values to get them back to where they were supposed to be. They were all off in the same direction (too far SR and too far DS) but not by exactly the same values. This is really hard to say because where I pointed the mirror while making the correction may not have been exactly the same as where I recorded it the first time (I didn't have marks on the floor where the beam landed or anything like that). Now that I am thinking about it though, the next time I use an I-cue I should probably record a "calibration focus point" and mark the beam on the floor so I have some way of getting the light back to its correct position if it were to be accidentally moved.

 

[JHarpur]

A few points to consider - The ETC Express console will work well with the I-Cues in 4-channel mode if you link the two channels as 16-bit in the channel properties - it's accessed somewhere in Setup, most consoles it's the 11th entry. Select the first channel and hit S3 to toggle 16-bit. It should get rid of the fade jiggle when using 2nd-channel values.

Assuming there wasn't a wiring, voltage, or DMX datapacket conflict with the iris unit and the I-Cue, is it possible that there were levels for the I-Cue accidentally recorded in one or more subs? Those HTP/pile-on values would definitely skew your focus points, and it would result in consistently directional errors.

Another possible culprit would be the power draw on the power supply - if the Iris unit was drawing too much power while the I-Cue was starting, it could certainly throw the calibration off position. It sounds like the unit used to power the units was the Rosco PSU-02 [5-pin in, 4-pin out, no throughput] - which has enough juice to power 2 units (I've seen them used for two I-Cues, a pair of scrollers, or a scroller-and-mirror combination without issues.) - I can't see how an iris unit (one motor?) would draw more than an I-Cue (with two), but if there were more than 2 units on the PSU...

And just to clarify another (earlier) poster's comment: 50/50 is a typical Home position for movers - on an I-Cue mounted on a fixture which is mounted horizontally, it should point the beam straight down. It's also a shorthand term for 50% value on the Pan channel, and 50% value on Tilt.

 

[derekleffew]

... And just to clarify another (earlier) poster's comment: 50/50 is a typical Home position for movers - on an I-Cue mounted on a fixture which is mounted horizontally, it should point the beam straight down. It's also a shorthand term for 50% value on the Pan channel, and 50% value on Tilt.

Or, in 16bit: 32767/32767.

 

[coldnorth57]

About 4 years ago the theatre that I work in got 4 I-Cues and we know noting of fixtures or Personalities or fixture libraies so we happly setup the I-cues in the 8 bit mode and ran them off of 2 channels (pan and tilt) for each one, and home was way over hard right and down. The wiring for the I-cues is running out of the power supply to the first I-cue and then daisy chained to the rest of the I-cues and THEN back to the power supply for teramation and power equilation. We then got 4 Rosco DMX Iris and started to learn about these fancy things and then realized that we had NOT set up the patch with the fixture properly and we then switched to 16 bit for the I-cues we loaded the fixtures into the patch as I-Cues 16 bit that uses 5 channels (2 for pan, 2 for titl and 1 for the DMX Iris) and when we loaded thses things into the patch properly they homed (50/50) KOOL! We also no longer used sliders to run pan and tilt and iris. They are programed with the wheels or on the command line.
PS
The Rosco DMX Iris are run off of a dmx splitter on their own daisy chain.

 

[Smatticus]

I checked out my show file in the offline editor and the I-Cue channels are appropriately setup as 16-bit, independent, and LTP. I didn't go into the channel attributes and change them; my moving light personality automatically set them up that way.

On a side note, shouldn't the pan and tilt channels being LTP mean that if I play back a cue and I want to decrease the value of the pan and tilt channels, moving the channel sliders at all should cause the level to change? Because the channel slider is the latest command to set the level shouldn't it take over, even if I want a value lower than that set forth by the cue? I am asking because this is not the behavior I was experiencing. If I wanted to decrease the level of the pan or tilt in a cue already played back I had to actually capture the channel and type in the value. If I wanted to increase the value of the pan or tilt in a cue already played back then it would let me do that with the channel slider but, if I then wanted to use the update command to update the focus point, the focus point would not actually update because I did not have the channels captured.

The subs are a good theory but I only used a few for cue recording and a few to turn on my hazers and fog machine. Checked that in the offline editor as well, none of the I-Cue channels are in any of my subs. Even if the pan or tilt were recorded into a sub this would only cause a problem if the recorded value was higher than that recorded in any of the cues, and if the sub was actually up during the performance.

I don't know about the power supply issue. Had the production been longer and I had more time to troubleshoot I could have played with taking the iris out of the chain or giving it its own power supply. Now we will never really know what would have corrected it.

I assumed what was meant by 50/50 but I have never seen an I-Cue put itself into a 50/50 position during homing; I have only seen them go all the way to one side in pan and tilt. If any of the I-Cues I have seen do go to 50/50 they must only do it for a split second. I really don't know what coldnorth57 did to get his I-Cues to home to 50/50. I am sure my personality and fixture patch were fine, so I can't imagine my console configuration was somehow making the I-Cues home in a particular way.

 

[coldnorth57]

if the Icues are not set to receave 16 bit then they go to hard one way at home ...That is what I have seen with the ones i have

 

[mstutzman]

New issue all together but the title still fits.

I have (3) I-Cue units w/ dmx iris, all of them work perfectly, except for one. If the power supply is turned off, as are all the power supplies and fx, are turned off nightly, the I-cue in question will not receive its data. The line for power comes on, but no line for data or data strength. If you unplug the 4pin data and plug it back in while the PS in on it will strike and start responding perfectly.

My solution for the moment is to not turn off this power supply, but I would rather not make this a long term solution.

• I have plugged the power supply directly into the console. Bypassing everything else in the show.
• I have tried a different Power Supply
• I have tried new and different (4-5 pin) DMX cables, in shortest lengths.

Any advise?

 

[xander]

New issue all together but the title still fits.

I have (3) I-Cue units w/ dmx iris, all of them work perfectly, except for one. If the power supply is turned off, as are all the power supplies and fx, are turned off nightly, the I-cue in question will not receive its data. The line for power comes on, but no line for data or data strength. If you unplug the 4pin data and plug it back in while the PS in on it will strike and start responding perfectly.

My solution for the moment is to not turn off this power supply, but I would rather not make this a long term solution.

• I have plugged the power supply directly into the console. Bypassing everything else in the show.
• I have tried a different Power Supply
• I have tried new and different (4-5 pin) DMX cables, in shortest lengths.

Any advise?

Are you using a return line to the PSU?

 

[mstutzman]

Xander, yes I am. It works fine when it gets its data. But powering down and then up it gets no data. Ive tried the unit with a Chroma-Q PSU and an Appollo SmartPower PSU, same thing.

 

[derekleffew]

So the problems lies within the I-Cue itself and not in any power supplies or cables? Have you called Rosco at Toll free: (800) ROSCO NY * (800) 767-2669, and talked to them about this?