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Anyone Done this yet?

Im Thinking of Taking all the XLR connectors out of all my fixtures and replacing them with RJ45's. This way i can use cat5 patch cords to connect all my fixtures together.

any thoughts / ideas?

Are you talking about using these ???

http://isquint.net/2009/cpoint-lighting ... -adapters/


I would not bother myself as I still trust my XLR's and see no reason to add another joint in the cable.
Also I think Cat5e and the like is something NOT designed for the riggers of the road.

Is you reason purley about using a cheap alternative to signal cable and xlr's ???

I think matt is talking about replacing the XLR female and male chassis in all his fixtures for this:


Matt, if you do that, you making it actually harder for yourself because you are not using the standard anymore.
Next, normal CAT5 cable is'nt made for roadwork to be connected and disconnected, moved and abused several ways.
So you need to get some type of better CAT5 cable that actually is ready and made for rigging. The same goes for the fragile RJ45 connectors.
Also I think you need to use STP (Shielded cable) with shielded RJ45 connectors to provide an extra layer of defense. (Just like in the XLR cable is done with the ground).
And you can mistake an DMX input and output with eachother, now often they are just hard connected to eachother so it won't matter. But still, you can get strange results when they are'nt directly connected.

If you want my opinion: I won't do that and just stick to the 3 or 5 pin XLR's.

Yea,

I was thinking of going cat5, becuase i get the patch cords from work. but now that PSSL has 20 foot xlr's for $4 bucks, im not gonna touch them.

matt wrote:Yea,

I was thinking of going cat5, becuase i get the patch cords from work. but now that PSSL has 20 foot xlr's for $4 bucks, im not gonna touch them.

I already stated this in your other topic; these are not DMX cables. They might work just perfectly but they also might introduce various problems, depending on the surroundings and total length of cable. So it might work one day, it might not the other.

remco_k wrote:I think matt is talking about replacing the XLR female and male chassis in all his fixtures for this:


Matt, if you do that, you making it actually harder for yourself because you are not using the standard anymore.
Next, normal CAT5 cable is'nt made for roadwork to be connected and disconnected, moved and abused several ways.
So you need to get some type of better CAT5 cable that actually is ready and made for rigging. The same goes for the fragile RJ45 connectors.
Also I think you need to use STP (Shielded cable) with shielded RJ45 connectors to provide an extra layer of defense. (Just like in the XLR cable is done with the ground).
And you can mistake an DMX input and output with eachother, now often they are just hard connected to eachother so it won't matter. But still, you can get strange results when they are'nt directly connected.

If you want my opinion: I won't do that and just stick to the 3 or 5 pin XLR's.

This is more or less exactly what I was going to write yesterday! Changing over would be madness this way and in some cases impossible - dont do it!