Chauvet COLORstrip and Jands Vista

I am honestly quite proud of myself. I was able to fix a problem that, as far as I had found, no one else was able to solve(at least not without spending a fair amount of money).

If you’ve ever tried hooking up those cheap Chauvet COLORstrip LED’s to your Jands Vista system, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

We bought 2 of these fixtures some months ago, and obviously haven’t been able to use them at all. I’ll be honest, you’ll never find a LED strip at the price point(Only $175 on Buy.com). That’s what enticed us to buy a couple of them in the first place. Come to find out, that fixture doesn’t like Jands Vista at all.

Lucky for me, I was able to find a very easy, and cost free way of fixing the problem. First a little tech talk on the issue.

The problem is the extremely cheap transceiver chip in the COLORstrip(It is a $175 fixture after all). What happens is Jands Vista sends out a very high DMX refresh rate, and the COLORstrip can’t handle that high of DMX refresh rate. The buffer in the transceiver chip of the fixture fills up so fast that it freaks out and has to dump out all of the DMX info. Basically, it has to reset itself. Again, the problem is a cheap fixture. I knew there had to be a way to resolve this, so I set out to find the solution.

I had read in a couple of forums of guys who bought a DMX splitter and were able to set the splitter at a normal DMX refresh rate to resolve the problem, but I was trying to find a solution that involved us spending $0 to fix the issue.

Here’s the process of what happened…

First, I tried simply patching in the Chauvet COLORstrip straight out of the fixture chooser into channel 144 in the patch. It did as I expected… Lots of random flashes. I had full control of color and intensity, but could do nothing about the flashin.

Second, I tried putting a standard dimming control on channel 144, just to handle the dimming(obviously). Then I patched a simple RGB control on channels 145-147. I was hoping that trying to control the dimming and RGB mix separately would solve the problem. No such luck.

Third, I tried something I had read about in forums(but according to the writer only slowed down the flashing), and that was patching the COLORstrip to channel 1, then placing some space between that and the next fixture. And it worked! I had complete control over the COLORstrip and had no flashing. To be sure, I sat there staring at it for 10 minutes. Not a single flash. Again, full, complete, and total control over the COLORstrip with no flashing.

Now, just to tell you exactly how our fixtures were patched, I had the COLORstrip on channel 1, then the next fixture was a spot mover patched at channel 12. I didn’t choose channel 12 for any specific reason, it’s just the way our fixtures were already patched. Also, I read that some got the flashing to slow down when they patched the final fixture or a hazer on the highest DMX channel possible, so for most hazers that would be channels 511-512 on a 512 channel DMX controller. I didn’t have to do any of that. After I patched my spot mover on channel 12, all the other fixtures followed right behind it.

The great thing about getting this to work for us is that it saved us about $1400 in new fixtures or DMX splitter for our Easter stage design. We were planning on using a bunch LEDrain 64’s, but now that the COLORstrips work, we only need a couple more of them to do probably an even better job that the LEDrain’s.

So in short, simply patch the Chauvet COLORstrips to channel 1, then place your next patch on channel 12, then follow every other patch as normal. Now, it may work out that you just need to patch the COLORstrip to channel 1 then run your other fixtures directly behind it. I just now how I was easily able to get it working without a single glitch.

I should also say that I only patched a single COLORstrip. I plan on daisy chaining 5 of them, all set to DMX channel 1, for the stage design. I’m also going to mess with patching my next fixture directly behind the COLORstrip(to channel 5) during the stage design. I’ll be posting after that to let you know the results I get with those changes in the set up.

NOTE: I am running the Mac based software of Jands Vista  and use the S3 external controller. I’m not sure if there would be a difference in results between platforms and controllers, but you never know.

If you’ve been able to find another workaround for the COLORstrips on your Jands Vista system, please let us know.