The Avolites Discussion Forum

Hello everyone, my first post here.

We're a bunch of amateurs running (in our 20th year) a small venue in Porsgrunn, Norway. We have just recently upgraded our light equipment and now have a setup with a brand new Pearl Tiger and some 30+ par cans and (so far) two Optima Matrix 300's spots.

I have recently experienced a problem with one of the 300's. I'm seeking to find out if this problem is located in the fixture itself or within the desk:

The 300's used to respond smoothly to the Tracking On/Off commands from the ML menu. However that has suddenly changed:

* Wether or not Tracking is set to ON or OFF makes no difference
* using stored palettes for pre-defined positioning makes one of the fixtures go to the "inverse" position
* shapes stored are affected also.
* restoring shows from USB backup (recorded before this problem occured) makes no difference.
* when using the tilt/pan wheels for the troublesome fixture, the pan sometimes feels like it struggeling with itself on which direction it should move. The other fixture doesn't have any "strange" feeling to it.

I'm unable to find any settings in the desk that should cause this behaviour? Any ideas or solutions would be most highly appreciated!

That sounds like a fixture or line fault.

Try addressing problem fixture to same address as good fixture. Both should respond identically.

If not eliminate cable fault first making sure line is terminated then look at fixture itself.

niclights wrote:That sounds like a fixture or line fault.

Try addressing problem fixture to same address as good fixture. Both should respond identically.

If not eliminate cable fault first making sure line is terminated then look at fixture itself.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out - I know for sure it isn't terminated and it is also the last one in the loop, so ...

120 ohm resistor over pin 2&3, isn't it?

Correct, although my instincts tell me this is probably a fixture fault.

niclights wrote:Correct, although my instincts tell me this is probably a fixture fault.

Ok, problem solved. You were quite right about the fixture being the cause, but the problem was a bit different than I expected.

The units built-in settings menu has obviously been altered so that Pan and Tilt both were set = reverse. "Someone" has obviously changed it without informing anyone...

Found it when I checked the manual regarding address settings (to change it to the same address as the other one) , and saw that it was possible to change the default directiosn for tilt/pan..

Anyways, thanks for the help - you had me going in the right direction, and I have to admit I'm very, very green about all this light stuff