Cheap Amazon pixel controller

[Mr Tinker]

I'm appealing to the brain trust here......
I'll ty to keep this short, and answer anticipated questions.

Using an 8 Gig Pi5
ArtNet to a generic ArtNet pixel controller
Networking knowledge: average
Linux knowledge: enough to get in trouble

This is my first foray into pixel strips at home, I have built a couple commercial projects using some very expensive hardware, so I thought this would be a breeze......

I bought this cheap ArtNet pixel controller off Amazon, 8 output ports, it's supposed to handle 48 universes, I had it running 12 with no issues. 
The things I can set through buttons on the front;
Number of universes/pixels per port
Universe size,(510, 512......)
The number of universes on cascaded controllers
and the last octet of its' IP address, it collects the first three on its own.
If I use the Discover on the controllers tab of xLights, it will find it, and populate the IP address.
The only info that comes up for a name is K08-SHMX.
The first time I set everything up was pretty simple, I had 10 universes of strip lights running out of 2 ports on the controller, driving it with FPP 8.? on a Pi5....... I was tickled!!, building animations and schedules like a madman ,  and bought 2 more of these $100 controllers before they were gone.

As it started getting colder over the winter, some strange things started happening, I thought just with the Pi, its' minimum temperature is 0 degrees, and we were at or below that for a solid week. I was turning the power off to everything during the day. I kept fixing the things that seemed to be disappearing with the cold, and as long as I left it powered up, everything was fine.
It finally got to the point where the Pi wouldn't boot, again I'm assuming because of the sub-zero temps.
I brought everything inside, re-flashed the SD card, booted it up on the desk, loaded the same show files back in it, and all seemed good, until I took it back outside and connected everything back to my lights, then nothing, zero, zilch, zip, not one damn pixel would come on.
I've been messing with this thing off and on for two months now and have gotten nowhere.
I believe the controller is OK, it has the ability to run stand-alone from a SD card, which it does with some generic rainbow chase scenes. The Pi appears to be fine, it boots up, FPP starts and acts normal. If I start a sequence playing, the activity lights on both the Pi and the controller ethernet connectors blink with glee, but I get nothing for output to the lights.
I've tried three different Pis, two different controllers in every combination with the same result. It sure seems like I'm missing something in the setup, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. It worked once, it should work again.
The controllers do not respond to ping from FPP or anywhere else, I don't know if it did before, everything worked pretty much out of the box so I didn't have reason to try it.
I have tried port scans with Nmap, It says the host is there at the controllers IP, but no other response.
I will be extremely grateful for any and all input.....

[MikeKrebs]

What does your output tab look like in FPP?

If you run a test from FPP, do you get anything?

[Mr Tinker]

running the test patterns from FPP doesn't produce any output, again, there appears to be network traffic, but alas, no joy....

screenshot of my output screen......

You cannot view this attachment.

[Mr Tinker]

does this mean anything to anybody?

You cannot view this attachment.

[breese]

Are you running the FPP as a Proxy?
I see the wired network is on the .1.X network and the wireless is on the .0.Y network...

[MikeKrebs]

I think I would find a way to reset the controller and start setup from scratch on controller. When you have all the information from the controller, then come back to FPP and set it to match. I googled around and there isn't much documentation on the controller. I think all the ports will be the same size and the universes always start at 1? So your existing setup looks pretty good for 12 universes. Did you setup your sequence with 12 universes?

[allknowing2012]

ci-universes..   that would be channel INPUTS. Do you have inputs configured? that would allow fpp to take in data from xlights to push to the outputs if that is what you are trying to do. Usually all you need to do is put a checkmark on the inputs page but I dont know about artnet specific needs.