This past weekend we had a important show. About 30 minutes before start of first set one of the lights (a venue thinpar, which is a7 ch rgb wash light, and comprise most of my system) started behaving erratically. I start checking dmx addressing, then channel settings, replacing dmx cables, then suddenly everything downstream of this lights just goes haywire. Everything is flashing randomly and I have no control what so ever. It turns out that quite by accident I find one fixture that has a bad dmx output socket (broken solder joint) I'm pretty new to DMX lighting in general but it seems pretty scary that with using a serial connection, if one unit fails it effects everything down the line. Seems like a bad design concept.
Have any of you had this issue? how do you deal with it? Gear will fail, especially these fairly cheap DJ fixtues. Do you carry spares for everything? Can lights be disabled in software?
I finally got everything working with about a minute to spare. I had to position the bad light 'just so' as to keep the connection. It was hard to run the show after that as I was so stressed.nono
BTW: no software issues, V7 and midpipe seems to play nice and all is well on that front.