Hello from Vancouver! - Seb’s helped a fair bit via email for which I am gracious. All of my issues have been pretty much network related which I think I have a handle on now.
I recently purchased two ether dream (version 4) controllers and had one of them up and running controlling a knight 15 watt laser. I directly docked the ether dream’s ilda port right into the laser ilda and was happy to finally be able to use liberation with some new gear.
Excitedly, without much thought I decided to try the supplied idla to rj45 cable by plugging it into the rj45 ilda port on the laser which turned my working ether dream into a non responsive solid red led.
I find it hard to believe that this action would have caused damage to the ether dream but cannot seem to revive it. I left it off all weekend and the 3 amber lights returned this am but shortly thereafter went to 2 solid red.
I’ve read you can reset them with pin jumping 24 and 25 with a paper clip during a power cycle but that didn’t work. Curious if anyone has any knowledge or insight into how to hard boot or reset this ether dream. It does not appear on sitter and the other ether dream does. I’m afraid I bricked one which may have been an expensive mistake.
I also do not seem to have any luck with viewing the ether dream via usb on either windows or mac to swap out or replace the firmware.
Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated !
those dual RJ45 ports on a laser are just ILDA signals divided over the 4x2 twisted pairs..
So if the laser unit puts any power on the pins that will surely fry something on the ED4 side…
I was also confused about the RJ45 connectors on the Knight lasers at first, but like PsyBeam said, theyre just there to carry the (1) ILDA signal over (2) RJ cables so you don’t have to deal with the large/expensive ILDA cables. If i’m not mistaken, these RJ45 ports can be perfectly ‘recycled’ into Ether dream ports, if you’d build them in.
Maybe it is relatively easy to repair/replace a part/parts on the PCB if you explain what happened to someone with knowledge in electronics?
Are you happy with this Knight laser unit? I have their magic 3 watt and pub 5 watt.
Thinking of buying two 10W units for future outside/larger gigs in their december sale.
Thanks PsyBeam - i was setup for failure as I would have regardless at some point tried to plug in the supplied cable adapter into the rj45 ilda port. It was too tempting and I didn’t think about the voltage that may be present - I didn’t think I cooked anything onthe pcb and was hoping to re-upload the bios but there isn’t much info on the gen4 ether dreams. I would have thought the design to include a diode for each ilda pin to prevent this from happening as the voltages for ethernet would be very low. I cannot access the bootloader on the functioning ether dream either - Not sure if I am missing a .dll or but neither windows 10/11 or mac detect it when plugged in to the usb port. Live and learn looks like I’ll be ordering another ether dream.
I am super happy with the knight laser pub10 max 15 watt with 40k scanners. It is too bright for indoor use and unfortunately the laser doesn’t have the ability to adjust power without liberation. Next step is to take one of the knight lasers apart to see if I can use what’s inside to install the functioning ether dream. The smt on the ether dream pcb is pretty impressive I’m not sure a tech would be able to do it without specialized tools but I could be wrong. Worth a shot I guess - I know basic electronics but this is a little beyond my abilities.
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I know I’m a bit late here, but try another usb-c cable - especially if even your working ED4 did not show up as a USB drive on your PC. A sad amount of USB-C cables are charge only with no data connections. Find one that gets your working ED4 showing up
the recovery procedure with jumping pin 24 and 25 while powering the ED4 on does not do anything readily visible, but it boots into a simpler “recovery mode” where it should show up as a storage device on your PC - once you find a properly working USB-C cable, I recommend booting into that mode while connected to your PC, and drop the latest ED4.elf firmware on it - Ether Dream - Downloads - then power cycle the thing and hopefully it goes back to normal
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