Lights Not Responding to DMXis

[Swyko93]

Hey all,

So I bought some little LED par lights recently and they don't seem to respond to DMXis. My laptop is talking to my DMXis box (I have green lights on the box) and the lights are all addressed to ch. 1, but when I start pushing faders nothing outputs from the lights. I tested the lights with my Stage Setter 16 and they worked just fine. Unplugged the home run cable, plugged it into DMXis and nothing. Anyone else experience this?

I think it's probably because the lights are cheap China products, so the motherboards are just too dumb to handle whatever DMXis is spitting out. I'll probably just have to return them.

[NCN]

Well, one mistake I made once was having the master level set to zero.
An unlikely problem would be having a channel patch active.
Note that on the DMXIS panel there's a virtual LED between the logo and the "preset" button at the very top. If the software is successfully communicating with the hardware this will blink.

[Swyko93]

While I've made that mistake many times before, this was unfortunately not the case. All of the lights in the DMXIS chain are blinking, so thankfully I've got a connection. I was able to get them to work individually with DMXIS, but once I began Daisy chaining them, after I plugged in the 4th light in the chain they would all cut out! Weirdest thing.

If anyone else reads this, don't buy cheap China lights off of Aliexpress. Not worth it!

[NCN]

So then that opens up the possibility of cable incompatibility: using XLR instead of DMX. Also lack of end-point termination.

[wayouthere]

Or in my case, 2 of the 3 cheap chinese fixtures I bought on eBay simply don't work!

[pier6363]

Just as an additional thing...

Some fixtures have menu options that allow to choose the behavior of the fixture when it faces a DMX protocol failure.

Possible options upon a failure are (in some of my fixtures):

stuck to lights full on
black-out all lights
switch to auto programs

Not so sure what happens to the fixtures connected "downhill" to the one that faced a failure, never experienced this, fortunately

If you have such options available in your menu, try and see how is the setting, and program them all to a certain behavior, which will make you clearly understand that a failure has happened.

In this way you should be able at least to identify which of your fixtures seems to have DMX related problems.

Maybe you can move on with your troubleshooting from there.

Good luck!