Differential receiver 2.01 blue with stuck pixel strings

[ItsRaaandy]

Greetings, searched but didn't find anything obvious to my situation, so here goes.

I inherited a school lighting setup from a colleague who retired, and I'm trying to finish getting it working. Setup is a Kulp K32A-B and a set of v2.01 blue differential receivers (eight total, two set up as singles and six set up as three receiver chains)

I've learned a ton (mostly about how much I need to reengineer the project to be more repeatable in the future - it looks like it was built for a one-off) and I've been debugging almost literally during my Thanksgiving break.

Last night I got everything just about there, but two strings are stuck full white. If I hit the test button on the receiver, they go back to being well behaved, but once I run a sequence, they are back to full white. It's only a couple of ports on one receiver, which is the middle one in a chain of three.

Terminators are off, dial is set to 2 on the receiver (the controller is still running FPP 4 and I'm in no mood to go through an upgrade unless there's no other option), and it's frustrating that there's no troubleshooting I can apparently do inside of FPP to see what could be the matter.

Any help would be amazing, the show is supposed to launch tonight, I may have to just pull the plug on the stuck strings if I can't figure it out. Thanks!

[JonD]

You are running a very old version of FPP 4.x that has not been supported for several years.  You mentioned eight SRs at various configurations, but you did not indicate which one of the 8 SRs are full white.  You mention running a sequence, but don't indicate which software or software version. You suggest terminators are off,  but don't mention which ones.  There are a ton of ways these can be configured, and without details on how yours is setup, it would be very difficult to offer any suggestions.

You might want to post some print screens of the controller configs and how the controllers are setup in sequence software (xLights?) 

[ItsRaaandy]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I'm definitely aware of the age of the firmware, but proximity to launch has me gun shy about updating.

As it turns out, the problem was on port 1 of two of the downstream SRs (I wasn't able to confirm this until this morning when I stepped on the roof of the school building). This made me think that perhaps the cat 6 cable might have a problem with the termination. Fortunately, I found a brand new cat 7 patch cord that I was able to deploy as a replacement, and the channels are now functioning correctly.

Troubleshooting is fun! I'll be mindful about the firmware and will upgrade it as soon as January rolls around.

Thanks

[JonD]

Never seen a test function work on a bad cable before.  Glad it is working for you though!

[ItsRaaandy]

The "test" i spoke of was the test button on the SR, not running a test in FPP.

I am relieved, and starting to plan out how I will change the labeling to prevent this from being a problem in the future.

Cheers!