Some customers have reported that when controlling lights through an SL04 box with MA2, the lights sometimes flicker or even pause for 2 seconds. This issue is actually caused by not following our documentation for settings. If MA2 is set up according to our method, there will be no problems.
What is the root cause of this issue?
If you are familiar with the physical MA2 console having two network cards, you will understand why. Physical MA2 console network card 1 only transmits MA2-NET data, and network card 2 only transmits Artnet data. MA2-NET and Artnet data are not transmitted through the same network card. If you try to transmit both through one network card, you would need at least a gigabit card because the volume of data is very large, requiring substantial network bandwidth and processing speed. Even the physical console cannot handle transmitting everything through one network card, so our box certainly cannot do it either.
If MA2 is not set correctly, both MA2-NET and Artnet will be transmitted to the SL04 box at the same time. When a large amount of network data accumulates, the box will struggle to process it and may pause for 1-2 seconds, causing the lights to flicker occasionally. The solution is to not transmit MA2-NET data to the box—only transmit Artnet data to it.
Therefore, the Session IP in MA2 must not be set to the box’s IP or any IP in the same subnet, otherwise both MA2-NET and Artnet data will be sent to the SL04 box simultaneously, causing network congestion.
Note: Many people do not understand what Session IP means. This IP has nothing to do with Artnet. MA2 is written according to the standard Artnet protocol. Artnet will only transmit to devices in the 2 and 10 network segments. It will not transmit to other IP ranges, for example, it will not transmit to networks like 192.168.*.*. (Please see our FAQ Q6)
The correct setup method is as follows:
1: The Session IP must be set to 127.0.0.1 so that MA2-NET will not be transmitted to the SL04 box.
2: Add the two DMX Nodes of the box to MA2.
3: Set the Artnet output to match the actual number of outputs on the box: 4
With these settings, there will be no problems. Please refer to the following video for details:
Youtube:
https://youtu.be/-YOGwoHZxhE