DMX Terminator Plug

[Benny Smyth]

In that case you have no choice but to terminate.....

[DazzyD]

Did you give him your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle?

[stormproductions]

Back on topic, I agree with Juski and think you've got either a cable or fixture fault.

I had a similar intermittent issue a few years ago which tracked down to being a dry joint inside a fixture where the DMX XLR (in or out, I can't remember) meant that each time I changed cables etc sometimes the fault would clear and sometimes remain. I had to take apart 16 of these lights to resolder all the XLRs onto the PCBs. Think I then found that more than 1 of them was dodgy.

And 'cheap' DMX or mic cables are often very poorly made and either a wire will have come off a pin or the wires are intermittently touching within the XLR.

Start with just your controller, 1 cable and 1 light and work from there.

[Nakatomi]

The last set of DMX cables I bought definitely say they're for DMX but the cable looks like medium grade mic flex to me. They work fine but the quality of shielding gives me pause for thought. I'll make my own in future!

[stormproductions]

Although technically wrong, DMX will usually work fine on audio cables. It's still electrons moving along copper wire and for the sort of basic use we're mostly putting them to I wouldn't be too concerned about using mic leads instead of DMX.

But the quality of the connections can be awful. Oh, and I had some low quality cables years ago where it appeared they'd basically been manufactured with non-continuous wire inside, so there was literally a break in the cable from new! You could chop them in half and meter out to the connectors on the ends and one half would work but the other wouldn't, and by cutting the faulty section in half each time you'd eventually find a broken wire.

As with most things in life, unfortunately you get the quality you pay for and things can be cheap for a reason. I love the low prices you can buy some things for, but I've also learnt the hard way that it depends on the use you're putting cheap things to as to whether it's worth it.

[Benny Smyth]

Well...as it turns out, a terminator solved the problem.

It wouldn't have been cabling as I did swap out all of my cables with brand new ones in the troubleshooting stage (as I did mention in the OP). I did a test last night and it worked. Took it all down, waited for an hour and set it all back up again and it still worked. I'll be performing the same test tonight (belts and braces, and all that).

The only thing that's starting to niggle me is that something obviously changed, but I can't put my finger on what. I've read on forums that sometimes you're just 'lucky' that you can get away without a terminator, but I don't buy that.

[stormproductions]

Well if you're happy it's working ok then that's great. However, I'd almost wager a doughnut that the problem will crop up again at some point. It sounds suspiciously like the issue I had with dry joints on the XLR connectors on the lights themselves. Intermittent faults can be such a pain! I hope it carries on working fine for you though.

[Nakatomi]

I think if you need a terminator for things to work you'll pretty much always need one. Not just sometimes. It's possible that things were just on the edge & you got lucky but not very likely when it worked for so long without termination. My money's still on something being iffy in a cable or a fixture somewhere - or maybe - your DMX interface is going a little bit wonky