Fixtures are Flickering

Several issues can cause Intermittent Flickering of fixtures.

Inspect your rig and check to see if it is only one fixture type or one whole unit of DMX output. Reporting this will aid in our support.

Terminate all DMX runs:

A DMX terminator is a 120-ohm resistor that terminates the DMX signal. If the DMX signal reaches the end of the lighting run and isn’t terminated, it can bounce back, causing interference, flickering lights, and loss of control.

Connect a DMX terminator to the DMX OUT at the very last fixture in the chain, which terminates the signal.

Ensure you are using a DMX cable, not a microphone cable

Using any other cable (for example, microphone cable) that doesn’t meet the electrical characteristics (impedance & capacitance) as the DMX specification can cause intermittent errors (strobing/flicking, loss of signal).  The DMX standard states that the cable must have an impedance of 120 ohms.

Test your cables and connectors

Use a cable tester. If you do not have one, you should swap out suspect cables with known working cables

Use Professional Grade Fixtures

Some nonprofessional-grade fixtures may not be able to handle professional DMX refresh rates, may be swamped by data, and flicker. A DMX decelerator can solve this.

Turn off RDM Discovery

RDM Discovery is off by default in ChamSys consoles. Ensure you have not turned it on and left it on by mistake. Some nonprofessional grade fixtures that are not RDM capable can not handle an RDM signal over DMX.

Keep number of Fixtures per DMX run to 32 or less

Keep DMX cable run total length to less than 4000 ft but preferably around 1000 ft max.

Troubleshoot

If the issue is confined to only one or two fixtures, jump the DMX cable past the fixtures to see if the issue resolves. If it does, it may be a cable/connector local to the fixture or a fixture issue.

Temporarily bypass the opto iso splitter on the run if using one, if issue resolves replace the opto iso splitter.