We are using Photon on an iPad to control DMX lighting in a church. Nothing fancy, just dimmer control on house & stage lighting, spots & accents. The problem is that Photon sometimes loses connectivity with a particular light (random, not a specific light every time), and in the “Light Control” panel the dimmer icon for the “lost” lights turns red. Tapping on the dimmer control reconnects the light. I need Photon to auto-reconnect / resync to these lights, so the operator doesn’t have to drop out of the “Live” panel back to the “Light Control” panel to fix lights that aren’t “talking” correctly.
Hello, is this problem complementarily random? Do you use sequences to animate your lights?
Can you send us your show so that we can perhaps reproduce the problem?
Yes, random lights disconnect. It typically doesn’t happen in the middle of shows, it happens when the system is being powered on (or off), and Photon is started before the DMX interface is running, or the DMX interface is powered off before quitting Photon.
Auto-reconnect would be easiest for the operator, i.e. Photon would attempt to re-sync when it detects one or more fixtures offline, and maybe have a configurable timeout? It might be just as good to have a “DMX Resync” button somewhere on the Live screen that would just reenable all fixtures and reinitialize the DMX communications.
I can send you the show; where should I send it?
Photon sends messages (with all the states of the lights) to the DMX interface, which then distributes these messages to the lights. Photon cannot be disconnected from a single light. Either it loses all control, or it works. Consequently, the problem is either related to a message sent to a group (the wrong information is sent), or to the DMX interface.
So we can’t create this DMX resynchronization button, because the messages are unidirectional and there’s no synchronization as such.
You can send me by private message
So what really needs to happen is for the operator to turn Live mode off, then back on. Which makes sense. But when I do this, does Photon re-enable any controls that were disabled on the Light Control panel? I’m thinking that it doesn’t re-enable anything, that I have to go to the Light Control panel and touch each control that got disabled due to lost connection or whatever.
I tried this, and sure enough, turning Live off & back on causes Photon to reconnect to everything. Fantastic! That’s easy enough, I should be able to train folks, or even just put it on a post-it note.