Crash upon hitting PLAY

[jamills6377]

I am finally getting hardware hooked up to test xLights talking to LOR controllers. I have one controller (Pixie16) hooded up on Comm3. It does not yet have all of its pixels connected but has 12 strings of 100 folded in hal to give 24 columns o 50 pixels in a matrix mesh. I wrote a simple sequence of 30-seconds of butterfly effect to see if it would play. I hit the light bulb and it seems to accept that all is well as it turns yellow. Then I hit the play button and the program instantly crashes....the debug window opens briefly with nothing displayed in it and then it all simply vanishes. I have done this repeatedly and it always does the same thing - I even tried it with a full blown sequence to see if it was just something in my test one - but it doesn't matter what I try to play it always crashes instantly. As I am running this connected to hardware for the first time - I am now on my Windows machine and do not have any idea how to do a screen capture video on that machine (since I usually use my Mac). If you want to see a video o me hitting play and having it crash, I'll need someone to tell me the best way to do a screen capture video on the Windows machine. I can take screen shots and send them o any configuration screens you might want to see if you tell me what to send (please remember I am very new to xLights so I may not know what you need unless you tell me the screen you want to see). Thanks in advance for anything you can do!

[Tim R]

I have the identical problem you just described, I was on here looking to figure out what I had done wrong.
I connected mine to LOR's S5 software to test, and it  works fine. I am wondering if its a problem with xlights software, or are we not setting it up correctly in xlights. My prop is also a 24x50 Matrix, with 12ea 100 pixel string
folded over.  Hope there is a resolution to this issue real soon.

[Gilrock]

http://nutcracker123.com/forum/index.php?topic=2819.0

[jamills6377]

No crash report can be delivered because as soon as the debug window appears it never fills in with any information and promptly disappears.
It happens on every single sequence I have tried (approximately 6 different ones - of varying lengths and with varying numbers of effects).

Here is what I do.....
STEP 1: open ANY sequence.
STEP 2: click on the Green PLAY Arrow.
STEP 3: watch the debug window appear for a second and then the whole program
     (including the debug window) disappears.

[jamills6377]

Here is the .xml of one of the many sequences that crashed.

I am running 2018.33 now - but earlier I had 2018.32 running - it did it in both o them.

I did not do a screen capture because I would think you could imagine my mouse pointer moving to the green play arrow and clicking then a blank debug window appearing and the whole thing disappearing. If you'd like to see that, I'll be glad to capture it for you.

Please remember, too, ALL of my controllers are LOR controllers - at the moment I am only testing with 2-Pixie16 controllers connected which drive my 50hX64w matrix. All of the pixels connected to these 2 Pixie16s are WS2811 type flat pixels (also purchased from LOR).

[Gilrock]

And I did not do anything to troubleshoot the issue because you can probably imagine me sitting here with not a single file to view...

The crash information most likely is still in the log file so when you crash just reopen xLights and do a Tools->Package Log Files.

[jamills6377]

Instead of using a more complicated sequence like I attached yesterday, I created a new one - animation only - a single color wash effect on only my matrix prop - it, as I suspected it would, crashed as soon as I hit play and did not produce a debug screen. So, per your instructions, I reopened xLights and packaged the logs. They are attached here.

I also ran a Sequence check and attach it's results here so you can see that there appear to be no problems with the sequence itself.

I also packaged that test sequence and attach it in case that might include anything which could be of use to you.

[jamills6377]

Further information...
I submitted a bug report to LOR as I also tried to run the xLights Convert process on my sequence and open it in their S5 software to see if I could just run my show from their software since it was their hardware. The file created from the xLights conversion appeared to be an S4 version sequence to S5 - and so it tried to upgrade that sequence to run in S5 - that hung up the program. I sent that same "BabyShark" converted sequence (the xlights created .lms file) and received the following response from them this morning:
"Your sequence has no physical channel information - no device type, unit id or universe, etc. S5 needs this information to upgrade your sequence properly. It matches the physical channels in the S4 sequence with the channels defined in your preview. "

[Gilrock]

I haven't done the LOR Convert in over 2 years so I don't really know the process everyone follows.  A lot of people are doing it though so they could chime in any time but you know most people don't want to read other people's issues they ignore everything here until they need help with their own problems.  I just did a convert and the LMS file opens up in LOR S4 so it seems like all you need to do is an Edit -> Export/Import Channel Configuration in LOR to import your controller setup from one of your other sequences.  That's the method I always used to make sure I had a common setup when I created another sequence.

[jamills6377]

Thanks for that. So,that's why I have no Channel information in it in LOR - because that doesn't come out with it in the convert?

Which really means I need to recreate my whole layout in LOR. I moved to a new house and only used xLights to set up everything here - thinking xLights would just play to the LOR controllers or I could export the sequences and they would just play - not realizing I'd have to do that configuration of channels in both places - thought xLights would have that data and include it. I guess that shows my lack of knowledge on how the back ends of this stuff really works!

Still - I would rather just use xLights and have it run my LOR controllers.

[Gilrock]

Well you are trying to run an ambitious amount of channels using LOR dongles with xLights.   We used to only support 96 channels with LOR dongles.  My LOR optimised output was an attempt to improve that but I have no idea how many channels it can do.

But from the log it appears to me you don't have all the dongles attached to the COM ports.  Do you really have 7 LOR dongles connected to your computer?  Each one of those LOR Optimised outputs needs a LOR dongle and its own COM port and it needs to be connected when you try to run the lights.  It shouldn't crash but I doubt I'd be able to reproduce and fix that this year.

[jamills6377]

I do have 7 dongles/LOR networks. BUT at the moment I am only running the Matrix and consequently only have those two dongles connected Com 3 & 4 for LOR Networks AuxE and AuxF - which is LOR Unit IDs 50-5F & 60-6F.

I have a total of about 6400 Pixels and a few A//C channels - I think my highest Channel number in xLights is 19241.

[jamills6377]

I guess when I first looked into xLights and asked about LOR support I should have mentioned how large my display was! LOL I just asked i it would drive LOR and was told in the forums and on Facebook that it would! But I ind now that most folks mean A/C when you talk about LOR controllers - not Pixels.

If money was no object I would just keep all of my Pixels and buy Falcon controllers...but I have already blown my whole light show budget for this year. I moved to a new house and had to do a lot of updating of props to make things work! Oh well - there is always next year!!!

[Gilrock]

Problem is you have all the outputs listed as "Active".  I would set the ones not connected to inactive.  If that doesn't work I'd try to isolate.  Maybe copy your show folder and then try reducing it to just one output.  That's how I troubleshoot I try to divide and conquer.   Figure out what works and what doesn't and try to reduce the number of variables involved.

[jamills6377]

Hmmmm - OK - I thought that by saying "Not Connected" in the setup screen that would imply they weren't active. I guess I'll have to look further or that Active/Inactive stuff.

By "reducing it to one output" do you mean, just have one controller set up?

I did make a simple sequence that only addressed the Matrix itself with a Color Wash - which is what I think I sent to you this morning. But you mean something more simple than that?