by Pink LD » 13 May 2011, 02:27
What order the fixtures are in, in the daisy chain makes no matter. You could have unit 1, 7, 6, 3, 2 etc down your daisy chain. You just cant split a daisy chain unless you use a proper DMX Splitter and you shouldn't run the daisy chain in a loop.
I can run 40 of my fixtures up to 300 feet of cable before they will start getting buggy. But at 250+ runs I always use a splitter myself. Of course now that I own several splitters I just use them all the time.
A terminator is always worth a try from what I hear. Personally I have never had a problem solved by the use of one and I don't use them myself. I do always carry one in the off chance that it will solve a problem but in 500 shows I'm still waiting for one to be my solution...
Do your fixtures have multiple mode settings? Perhaps one fixture is in 7 ch mode, for example and the others in 5 ch mode. If you have them addressed in the program as though they are 5 ch fixtures, your 7 ch would be overlapped.
(Note: I don't know exactly what fixtures you have so I don't know how many channeled they are or how many modes they have, so my previous sentence is an example.)
On another note: Have you used the "Patch" program? Do you have an erroneous patch buggering up the works? Have you fired up the DMX setting and turned on "Show DMX levels" to see what is actually going on?