Another process is accessing the lights -What ??

[Tory Street Lights]

Currently running Xlights 39,  I am getting an error message warning that "another process is accessing the lights - do you want to proceed" when running a sequence "out to the lights" from the sequencer as a test.  There is nothing else running on the machine at all, and I do not get that message if I close Xlights and run up the scheduler to play the sequences from there.

Any reason for this, or do I ignore it, although is appears to have a bearing on the operation of my USB Dongle driven Lazer projector, it misbehaves big time.

Any thoughts  ??

Terry

[Gilrock]

Upgrade to newer version.

[Tory Street Lights]

Upgrade to newer version.

Thanks Gill Will do, it was running nice and stable so I didn't want to generate any hassles.

Terry

[Tory Street Lights]

Upgrade to '41 seems to have got rid of that error, thanks Gill for the heads up  :-)

Terry

[Gilrock]

I should have clarified you could ignore it.  I shouldn't be recommending an upgrade during show time unless there is a critical change you need.  I'm still running v38 myself.

[Tory Street Lights]

Guess what  :-(  The message re-appeared when testing from xLights sequencing screen to the controllers  this afternoon  :-(

Terry

[Gilrock]

So I'll just explain how it works.  When you turn on Output to Lights in either xLights or xSchedule we write to a flag in the registry.  We attempt to keep that flag up to date but there are cases where the flag can get out of sync with reality such as if xLights crashes the flag is not updated so next time you start the program you would get that warning when attempting to output to lights.  If you know you don't have a problem then just ignore it.  The true test is are your lights really working?  The warning is there because we had several users that kept trying to turn on Output to Lights in both programs at the same time and that doesn't work.  We were trying to help out those users.

[Tory Street Lights]

Thanks Gill, that makes perfect sense. 

As far as I am aware there is nothing running in the background, and I am certainly not attempting to run both Scheduler and Xlights at the same time, so there must be something "odd" with the old Quad-core Dell T610 server that I am using as a show machine, Win 7 and 10 Gig's of ram  :-(  Maybe a change of machine may help.

The lights are running perfectly as far as I am aware, using the scheduler and xLights it'self to test the setup sequence by sequence if necessary, as well as testing individual items. The only thing that isn't doing what it "should do" is the DMX feed which I can live without at this stage of the display season if necessary, hence my query in the other thread.

Something I did observe, which now adds up! On the first load-up of xLights to test the DMX, it produced the "error message" and the DMX was AWOL, if I closed xLights and the sequence, then re-loaded xLights with the same sequence, on most occasions the DMX operated as expected/programmed!!  It must have cleared whatever flags were set on the second load,  I will try that process with the scheduler and see if it has the same effect, although I have never seen that error message with the scheduler.

Thanks for your input, no sweat at all.

Terry

[Gilrock]

But keep in mind the flag and the warning message have zero effect on operation.  We don't stop outputting because the flag is set we are still going to try to output.  Also DMX output is really different than any of our other output types.  There is nothing that would make one output type fail and another work except for issues with other processes already having the ports open.

[Tory Street Lights]

Thinks  --  3 x USB's to serial Dongles for Renards, 1 USB-DMX Dongle, 1 x (Real) Serial Com port for Ledtrix, maybe too many virtual comm ports involved!   I noticed that the DMX data indicator blinks as though it is getting data in "chunks" rather than continuous which could explain something, and the USB serial's are similar.  More "thinking" required on my part maybe  :-(

Terry 

[Gilrock]

Yeah if running directly from xLights it would probably work better to output E1.31 to a board that is dedicated to converting the data to DMX outputs.

[Tory Street Lights]

Yeah if running directly from xLights it would probably work better to output E1.31 to a board that is dedicated to converting the data to DMX outputs.

Thanks for the thought Gill, I will do some "digging" and see what I can figure out  :-)

Terry