delicolor

Cheers Edward.

Did the battery replacement article ever get written? I’m starting to get NVRAM errors on my 5 year old FLX. I see the manual confirms what screws to remove but not the innards. Ian

I’m busy for the Tagging one tomorrow (today by the time this is seen). Will there be a sanitised version available afterwords as per some previous ones? Thanks, Ian

PEBCAK made me smile. When I worked in Telecommunications, I queried why my Clerk of Works was writing NFG on rejection slips. He explained it stood for “Not found good”, at least when senior management asked. He had a special one for certain switchboard Operators as well- OFI, “Operator found ignorant”.

Thanks for your thoughts David. We certainly want the scenes on the UDK buttons 1-4 for occasions when the skilled people are doing other stuff elsewhere but there can be a simple showfile generally in use to achieve this and we can do more exotic things when required. The remote push idea is further down the line.

I was thinking along the lines of doors open/interval, show (Concert mode), show (ballroom mode) and FUF (full up finish, an old variety term). Latching to push any of the four buttons in order to bring the state(s) up and down. For the regular weekly concerts and dances a simple state will suffice. (Well, the dance has a number of overlaid slow chases but they will run on one fader already). This is all just planning as we are still on FLX-S at the moment.

I normally leave Youtube on auto. I looked again and it was running at 480p, although with stopping and starting again it gave me 720p. I have a 100 Meg pipe so top speed is normally fine. I attach a screen grab (at 480) to show why I thought the old Phantom may have been the reason, it is from May 20th 2021 so by coincidence exactly one year ago. Maybe Edward was having a bad internet day!

One other thing- I watched the online UDK video on Youtube to grasp what I could do with them and it struck me how difficult it is to read the drop-down menus on the old version of Phantom. It was never a problem following along with your PC as you could turn on the monitor or screen window but it is busy enough on the Youtubes with the visualiser as well. Are there any plans to refresh the old videos using the new phantom? (Or perhaps you have and I’m looking in the wrong place).

Thanks for your speedy reply. Reflecting on it, I thought that the buttons on the regular faders would only be a latching flash to full rather than a fade initiation but I’ve never explored it. I take your point about tying the UDKs up and we may want to do other things with them on occasions. I see each of the four keys has the choice of being locked to one state or having ten available following the page button. Could a macro trigger a defined page 10 UDK even though the UDK is locked to page 1? Thanks, Ian

I’m planning to use the four multi function keys to provide four scene states for when we don’t need to man the desk. We are in the process of moving our technical zone at the back of the hall up into a new control room and it occurs to me that we can make up some push-button panels to connect to the remote switch inputs, for simple state selection. I haven’t entirely got my head around macros yet but wonder how easy it would be for inputs to trigger MFK pushes rather than cues on a cue stack tucked out of the way somewhere?

I just mean that when I tap on a red profile entry from the fixture schedule, if not recognised it just shows as per the screen. I assumed it would have listed the attributes as per the .ist of the fixture, not just an empty black box. It isn't an issue, I just thought it would work slightly differently.

I will confirm tomorrow whether the same happens on the desk.

I have been trying this out on Phantom in advance of going to the venue. It seems to work fine and I get the expected results on Capture. However, I was surprised to see that all fixtures now show as orange on my latest showfile which had been saved at software level 7.10, previously I had a mixture of white ones for known lights and red ones for ones created from the .ift editor. Most of the ones that were white offer up the library one to update to (with the usual nuisance resetting of the description field) but the red ones don’t offer up anything, or even show the channel attributes. Will importing the fixture .ift file help at all at showing the attributes?

I recently obtained a wing which works fine as access to the other page of faders, however on turn-on it always starts up in channel mode even though the main desk comes up in the state last used, mostly playback mode in our case. (I haven’t entirely worked out the detail although it is presumably showfile related as a desk reset puts it back to starting in channel mode). The wing sensibly always starts on page 2 presumably because the desk always starts on page 1. Can I request that consideration be given to making it match the mode of the main desk on power up initialisation? We frequently have non-technical people bringing up a static lighting state (as well as PA & video) for our routine performances and the less key presses the better. Being able to page the display in fader display mode would be useful, someone else already raised this in the product improvement thread. Looking forward to trying out the new release. Ian

Interestingly, I upgraded the Leapfrog to 7.10 as well as the S24 and when I loaded up the current file from the S24 into the Leapfrog all fixtures 1-48 retained their fixture numbers rather than renumbering the non-dimmers from 101 onwards. This saves twenty minutes of fixture renumbering when keeping the backup up to date. So the original grumble seems to be resolved, much appreciated!

A user called Viola. Probably just registered up and started spamming.

Ah, that makes it clear, thanks!

Thanks John, that sort-of works in that the direction is respected although the finess is a bit lacking on hitting a particular level. (Although that could be me being heavy handed). It looks like the acceleration settings make it fiddly.

I’m loving the improved graphics on the Phantom and have installed 7.10 on our backup desk, hoping to move into live next week after testing. I don’t have any cell based fixtures to try out the new software with but I like the idea of what is possible. My trivial question is this- I was hoping that the improved desktop encoder wheels might have been easier to tweak now they are much larger but not using a mouse. Is there a reliable way to tease the wheels up and down when doing offline editing? Thanks guys.

Something our team would like is a simplistic ipad app like an architectural panel that gracefully transitioned to a number of set scenes or effects in an easy to use manner for when the skilled techs are doing other stuff. We have two venue uses a week that require lighting but from states already defined. Failing that, if the FLX-S booted up reflecting the faders and page/mode used on shutdown rather than defaulting to all faders off regardless of position, that would be useful. We have occasionally reverted to the Solution as we know it will immediately output the last state on bootup.

“TP-Link TL-WR841N 300 Mbps Wireless N Cable Router, Easy Setup, WPS Button” £15 from Amazon. Whilst I had a handful of old devices knocking around, I bought that one as it had several modes and I’ve found before that routers that are expecting to be able to get to the Internet via a WAN port can get sulky. It was on out of the box settings other than security settings.

Just to provide an update, I tried connecting the apps from my phone and windows tablet right next to the wifi router, the phone still wouldn’t connect to the desk with connection error message but the Windows app would. I than examined the config in the router, the only thing that I didn’t expect was the DHCP lease set to one minute. I then did a factory reset on the router and locked down the SSID, password and admin access. (DHCP had returned to the default figure of 120 minutes). Access was subsequently fine from the apps. So, either a router gremlin, or some of the devices don’t handle DHCP re-leaseing properly. Thanks for your help, it looks like no further action needed. Ian

I’ll do more testing next week. Just the router cabled to the desk, nothing else on that network.

I have had infrequent issues with “Desk connection failed” on both my Apple tablet and Android phone recently, both running latest software. Inevitably, on final tech focus, I couldn’t connect at all unless I renewed DHCP on the desk which would allow me in once for a short while. The desk IP always appeared in the app startup screen. Curiously, the Windows Zeros Monitor worked flawlessly on my tablet but it wasn’t practical to use that at the top of the access equipment! I suspect my wireless router settings as connectivity worked fine via my home hub but it is out of the box other than SSID and password. Before I dive into all the settings there, does anyone perhaps know why the apps might work on Windows but not Android or iPadOS?

Ok, but please put this behaviour in the documentation somewhere so that it isn’t entirely unexpected for others who encounter it.