The Lighting Controller

Hi,

I just experienced a crash in what I think is the latest version of SweetLight's ControlBoard (downloaded fresh today on my Netbook). While controlling it (Live window actually) through MIDI controlboard crashed, apparently it was trying to dereference a NULL pointer. Of course I have no idea if this is related at all to the MIDI control.

I went into Visual Studio and saved a .dmp file. Will this be of any use if I send it to you? It's only 18 kB.

Thanks,
Arjan

Thank you for the notice.
The Visual Studio will not help us. We note that this problem happen when you were using the window ControlBoard > Patch for dmx and midi > midi input. We will try to reproduce this problem.

Hi,

I've tried sending you (forum username 'support') a Private Message but apparently it didn't get any further than the Outbox and it's not showing up in the Sent Messages box. Did you actually get it? It's about a method to reproduce a crash in ControlBoard.exe by sending it MIDI messages very rapidly.

Please advise.

Thanks,
Arjan

Just to let you know, you can also contact support via email: support@sweetlight-controller.com

tomrbland wrote:Just to let you know, you can also contact support via email: support@sweetlight-controller.com

Thanks, that's good to know. For now I'll just wait patiently for them to get back to me either here in the forum or through the PM system.

On a completely different topic: do you happen to know any good forums on lighting? I know a few (prosoundweb, blue room, harmony central) but the amount of activity on these forums is not that high. I'd love to know if there is a forum where lower-end and mid-range fixtures are actively discussed and reviewed, for example EuroLite, JB Systems, ShowTec etc. I guess Chauvet would be considered mid-range by most.

Sorry, I only use Blue Room, that's mostly theatre/highend stuff. Perhaps looking at some Dj forums would be a good port of call? Sorry I can't be of any help!

We got the PM.
We could certainely not check this problem this week.
We will check that on next week.
Sorry for the delay.

support wrote:We got the PM.
We could certainely not check this problem this week.
We will check that on next week.
Sorry for the delay.

No problem and thanks for responding.

We are able to reproduce the problem, exclusively with the MID file you sent to us.
We will try to find a protection against such midi code sequence (this is not easy because this MID file is not really "standard").

support wrote:We are able to reproduce the problem, exclusively with the MID file you sent to us.
We will try to find a protection against such midi code sequence (this is not easy because this MID file is not really "standard").

Great, thanks! Please note that this MID file was just a very brute force way to generate this error. I'm getting the same error with general use where I am definitely only sending regular Note On/Note Off messages at normal rates.

I did notice that the sequencer that I used to record this MID file adds some extra stuff but I was unable to remove that from the file. My hope is that if you can get ShowXpress to tolerate what this MID file is sending that it will also be more resilient in normal every day use. Of course that's only true if the crash is caused by the same code in the software, in theory it could be that the crash from this MID file is causing a different kind of crash. But I'm hopeful

If you have the tools you could perhaps try to strip out all the extra stuff that my sequencer added and only leave the Note On/Off messages. I kinda expect that this modifled file will still cause the crash. Unfortunately I don't have the tools to do this myself for lack of a decent PC based sequencer.