myDMX Power Surge Issues

You need one of these.
http://www.elationlighting.com...gory=DMX%20Solutions
This will at least protect your lights and interface from a power surge.
Contact a local electrician about your power issues. your power issues have nothing to do with my dmx. you need to bring somebody into the church and look at it. Tell them what has happened and ask how to prevent it. Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions.
Sincerely,

Why do I need a 4-way DMX distributor? Man that is expensive! And nowhere in the manual does it say I need one of those.

First off that is the suggested retail price. you won't pay that price at any store. Think of that price as the most you could pay for it(but you won't pay that much anywhere)
This one time price will save you from buying several of the same interfaces over the course of time if your having power issues that result in your dongle getting fried every time the breakers are pushed to their limit. That is what is happening when you say that the lights flicker or black out when someone plugs in a vacuum to a surrounding wall outlet. Your maxing out that specific breaker. I would say you and your church need too familiarize themselves with how much available power you have on the breakers and what outlets are tied to what breakers. sounds like bad power distribution or just weak power in general. The opto branch 4 is optically isolated in that if there is a surge it will only take out the DMX chip on one of the 4 outputs and not fry out your dongle anymore and also protect your fixtures. If a power surge were to ever go down your dmx line into your fixtures, guess what? Your church would be buying all new 30 fixtures as they would all have fried circuit boards. Also are you using all DMX cables? or are they microphone cables? Also it is not going to say in any user manual for a program or lighitng board how to properly protect your fixtures and use splitters, that is just something that you learn or find out about the hard way as you do lighting. Hope this helps. Again, let me know if you have any more questions.
Sincerely,

Thank you very much for the information, this helps a lot. Are there alternative, cheaper units to the one you linked? I understand the price will be lower than what is shown there, but still just wanted to ask about less of a unit altogether.

I am sure there are but we don't offer any. Also they probably do not offer the optically isolated ports which is what you really need. No offense but, given your power situation this is not the time to be cheap.
Sincerely,

You might also want to try a ground left on the power supply as well. DMX when the control source is grounded to a different ground than the fixtures, it can cause issues. Its rare, but I have seen it happen. Your Mac Book might have a ground short that causes a spike through the ground and thus through the PC as well, causing the dongle to wig out (the dongle is grounded through the USB port). Or the power strip might be bad and the source of the spike. Cheap and quick, it might fix your problem.

However, I will still look into a splitter as well since it does much more than just split a DMX signal. It helps protect your fixtures, the dongle, helps prevent that ground issue I was talking about, and also boosts the signal that from dongles is generally weaker than from hardware controllers.

Thank you SerraAva for that feedback. I will definitely look into replacing the splitter and/or lifting the ground on it.

Question1 : is it possible that the power surge could have come from the other end of the dongle, from the DMX side and not from the PC/USB side?

Question2 : would this DMX distributor from Chauvet give us the same protection from surging and ruining the MyDMX dongle?

http://www.amazon.com/Chauvet-...id=1316188656&sr=8-1

Question3 : our entire DMX configuration is run in a single line. Should I just install this distributor in between the dongle and the first DMX cable/fixture?


Thanks again for everyone’s help. We are on our way to solving the problem. FYI, we have an electrician working on our system and making changes to our electrical configuration, and it just so happens that our dongle fried. Happened yesterday. So now we will for sure be buying what we need to prevent it from happening again.

1) prob not. dmx is low voltage.
2) No idea it is a chauvet product. look at their product page for it.
3) you can put the splitter anywhere in the line.
Sincerely,

Based on what I am hearing, the dongle will fry from the PC/USB side, not the DMX side.

If that is the case, would it have still fried if the PC was not plugged in during the surge? It is a laptop, so it can run on battery.

I'm not trying to conclude that we can run our system that way, I just want to confirm how a surge will damage the dongle, and which side it would come from.

Well........there are a few things that can damage your interface.
1 of them could be a surge through the dmx line back into the dmx chip and that fries out your DMX chip. Another is something wonky going through the USB cable that either A corrupts the firmware of the interface or B fries out the PCB board inside it.
I know I have broke a interface by trying to update the firmware in a old application that no longer comes with my dmx. I am also asking our engineers about this directly too so i might be back with a new reply.
Sincerely,
Sincerely,