Occasionally seeing a long delay

Troubleshooting
1

Using Photon 2 (Starter level) with an iPad, DMXking eDMX1 MAX converter, and about a dozen lights on a designated wifi network.

Wanted to get some guidance on how to troubleshoot a multi-second delay I occasionally see. I need to do an instantaneous trigger for some lighting actions. Usually, when I am testing everything at the start, everything is very responsive. Occasionally, usually later in a show, when I push a button on the Live mode, it will be several seconds (e.g., 5 seconds, 20 seconds, 40 seconds) until the action takes place (e.g., light turning on, light turning off).

I have wireless DMX as a good part of my setup, but when if I move stuff to wired DMX I see the same behavior. When I look at Photon 2’s DMX channel view, the commands take effect right away.

The wifi is very congested at this location at moments, but I have moved channels and the issue still occurs. It feels way too long to be a networking problem, but that is just a hunch. I have switched Photon 2 from art-net multicast to art-net unicast and sACN. Feels a little better but still a much longer lag than I feel is reasonable.

2

With wireless I occasionally have some lag. But with fully wired setup I have never seen it. Sources of lag I know of, that I still use alot, include Bluetooth midi controllers (and faulty footswitches), WiFi routers, DiFi wireless dmx controllers. If you are using wireless dmx that also operates in the 2.4 GHz spectrum.

Yes unicast, with a dedicated IP address assigned to the artnet to dmx converter helps. Also running a 5Ghz WiFi router is better for congested WiFi venues. I do that 100% of the time and disabled the 2.4ghz in my router. If you only have 2.4 then you may need to set it for a dedicated WiFi channel…

If a venue is really bad for wireless I may sometimes connect my iPad directly in to my Chauvet artnet to dmx converter with Ethernet cable, removing the WiFi router completely from the signal chain. I prefer not to do that (as it takes longer to setup/teardown, and lots of clutter on stage) but it does work better.

If you have long strings of lights in series you might also get dmx terminators. I have seen weird things with 4 or more lights in series sometimes. Use terminators in this case.