kgallen

Old post I know but your only hope now is one of the distributors: https://www.zero88.com/distributors/list/united-kingdom-and-ireland 5 are listed in the north west, but I don’t know which if any are still Zero88 dealers, or can offer repair services. Keith and Ian Knight are both gone (in different ways unfortunately).

The manual page 51 says the DMX input port performs a merge into the DMX output. See also page 20 item 4. So if you patch to different addresses it seems like this should work after cabling the DMX output of one Jester into the DMX input of the other. So have a read of the manual, and more importantly, try it out. https://www.vari-lite.com/b-dam/vari-lite/discontinued-products/jester/english/jester-manual-3-4.pdf Note: All our friends from Zero88 are gone and no one from Vari-lite has any interest in their current consoles let alone legacy ones they had no involvement with. So unfortunately we’re ’flying solo’ now. So us users (or non-users in my case with Jester) is all there is now. If you find out that you can (or indeed if you can’t) chain Jesters like this to expand your controllable channel count, it would be good if you’d take the time to document your findings here, to help other users. Good luck with your show.

Is it related to ‘Hide Fader Pages’ here? https://www.zero88.com/manuals/zeros/setup/settings/operational

I was going to suggest inhibit but I think that’s more a sticking plaster over the issue rather than a proper approach that David described above.

I believe you’re correct. I think MIDI and OSC can only trigger pre programmed cues. Others will know better than me though.

OSC or MIDI would be the usual remote control methods. Others on here have experience of these and will no doubt be along shortly (I have no experience of using them). You could search the Forum for OSC, there are quite a few detailed threads. User @Davidmk has a lot of OSC experience so you could look at posts by him in the FLX/FLX-S and Solution forums. examples:

There’s the USB Creator flow for FLX (not FLX-S) console recovery: https://www.zero88.com/manuals/zeros/software-updates/zeros-usb-creator

You create a chase on a fresh playback. Then you trigger and release that chase playback from cues in your main cue stack. To be able to get at states in your chase you use SHIFT-Playback GO to get to the state you want to edit without the chase running on. Then you edit the state using UPDATE as you would any other cue. https://www.zero88.com/manuals/zeros/cues-playbacks/chases

The AI overview on search term ‘what is a transmission line in digital signalling’ seems pretty good. It has characteristic impedance and signal termination sections. Sorry to the OP, we’ve probably gone a bit over board now! 🤓

Actually in audio the shell shouldn’t be connected to pin 1 either. Pin 1 is signal ground, shell is chassis ground and they aren’t the same thing as they deal with different types of interference (electrical, magnetic). https://www.ranecommercial.com/legacy/note165.html

For analogue audio cables, the impedance is not really an issue because the signal frequencies involved are very low. For digital signals the edge rate is very important and the capacitance of the cable has a big effect on this. Even for DMX at 250kbit/s the required frequency components can be well into the megahertz. Analogue audio cables of any appreciable length as can be found in DMX runs will severely attenuate the high frequencies required to convey a digital signal properly. For a digital signal like DMX, the cable acts like a ‘transmission line’ (Google that). That’s why we use terminators.

An ohmmeter won’t help you. The cables don’t have a different dc resistance they have a different ac impedance. The most practical way to tell is from markings on the sheath of the cable that will tell you it’s ’DMX’ or ‘digital’ cable maybe. If it says ‘microphone cable’ it’s not really for DMX use. You can use ‘DMX cable’ for microphones but ideally not ‘microphone cable’ for DMX. (My response coincided with David’s posting, I’ll read that now!).

@Davidmk unless the desk is continually rebooting due to intermittent power I doubt such a fault would only affect the LCDs. Happy to be proven wrong!

If you have no luck elsewhere, it's probably worth posting on the Blue Room too as there will be a lot of these desks (and the others I list) out in the wild. https://www.blue-room.org.uk/forum/2-lighting/

You were possibly referring to a post on here or the Blue Room by our good friend Ian Knight @iank99. Unfortunately Ian is no longer with us and I don't know what happened to what would have been an extensive stock of new and used Zero88 spare parts. If anyone reading this knows if that stock was salvaged and can be purchased, then it would be useful to make this community aware.