Reliability problems

[tsools]

Last Saturday I used the following configuration for 9 hours:
- fresh Windows 7 Pro 32 bit
- Sunlite 2006 (Jun 8 2010)
- SL2048EC box (bus powered)
- Behringer BCF2000

After 8 hours it became flaky. The user interface thread crashed and showed a dialog box asking me to send a bug report. I dragged the dialog box to the side of the screen and ignored it. Sunlite remained working although none of the graphical sliders for speed and dimmer could be moved anymore. The BCF2000 could still be used to affect those sliders and the lights remained working ok.

After another half an hour the lights stopped responding, Sunlite and box had to be restarted. One of the leds stopped blinking and the display showed things "88." or "P ". Using a power adapter (9 volt) instead of bus power for the box seemed to solve the problem.

In the past half year I had both problems quite often, especially during long shows. It also happened on different PCs with Windows XP and on older Sunlite 2006 versions. The latter problem seems a hardware problem related to power line spikes or cable interference. The first problem seems a bug in Sunlite due to one or more of the following factors:
- frequent use of the "Live" button on the Fixtures tab.
- frequent fixture tab switching
- use of the _MASTER page
- prolonged use of Sunlite

Because both problems only happen after prolonged use, I've never been able to reproduce it, it only happens during real shows.

Besides this, there seems a small glitch: if I select the "_MASTER" tab, then select the Fixtures tab, delete some groups ("Demo Color changer", "Demo L.E.D" etc.) and restart the program, the deleted groups reappear and any changes to them don't seem stored to disk.

These are all files related to the show:
http://www.sools.com/private/sunlite/crash20100911.zip
http://www.sools.com/private/sunlite/sl ... htdata.zip
http://www.sools.com/private/sunlite/co ... 100911.zip

Besides these small issues, I think Sunlite 2006 is a really cool tool.

[simonB]

Hi

Regarding the power spikes:
-try a different USB cable this can sometimes fix the issue
-if you have a smoke machine, try running this off a different power source if available
-make sure your interface is always connected directly to a USB port on the computer. If you must use a USB hub, try to make sure it is powered from an AC power adapter aswell as USB.


Regarding the fixture groups bug, we'll have it fixed in the next release.

There is little chance of us finding the Suite1 bugs which may only occur after 8 hours of use. This is one of the main reasons for starting Suite2 from 0. However if you find any pattern let me know.