Now that we’re getting into the holiday light show season, let’s talk about how to troubleshoot when you have problems with lights on smart receivers. One of the top things we see questions about over at Learn Christmas Lighting Academy is trouble with smart receivers – and that’s because there’s just more that can potentially go wrong, compared to regular controllers.

A brief history of smart receivers

For a bit of background, the smart receiver industry started off with a four-port regular receiver from Falcon (at least those are the first ones I’m aware of), and they’re similar to one in the stage lighting industry from a company called ENTTEC. These were fairly simple – if you had a problem there were only a few things to check, like the cable (this is still my first suggestion to check for any type of receiver, but more on that later).

Fast forward a bit and smart receivers come around, you could do three in a chain, and they worked with Falcons and Kulps. This was huge and really helpful, but it also added in a layer of complexity.

Honestly, smart receivers have never been more complicated, and it annoys me because I’m all about making things simpler in this hobby! So let’s get to the troubleshooting and try to simplify some of it for you.

Indicator Lights

One thing to check right away is the indicator lights. Any smart receiver will have LEDs on it somewhere that show you if it’s getting data on all four of the outputs.

Smart receivers in themselves are fairly simple in the sense that they don't really think for themselves. They connect to your controller along an ethernet cable that has eight pieces of wire inside of it in twisted pairs, it gives you four channels, basically four ports, that you can put on a smart receiver.

So the first place I always look is at those data LEDs – are they lighting up, and are they supposed to light up? In most circumstances they should be lighting up, occasionally I've seen where they don't light up if you don't have anything assigned to a port. But check that all the ports lit up that you think should be lit up. Is there one missing? Is there one that's lit up that shouldn't be and one that should be that's not? Because all of these are symptoms of a bad ethernet cable.

Bad Ethernet Cables and How to Test

Let’s talk about ethernet cables. A lot of times we tell people this and they say “well, I just got this one out of the package.” Guess what, when you buy mass-manufactured ethernet cables online, a decent number of the places that sell them don't test them. The factory spits them out, but they're never tested – not for pin out, not for speed, anything. With smart receivers speed doesn't really matter, but pin out does. All the pins have to be right or else it's not going to work.

There's a few ways to test an ethernet cable. Don't ever assume a cable that worked before or that you got new out of a package is perfect, because there's no guarantee of that!

One way is with the Falcon “F Test”. I love this thing - in fact, we don't sell them and don’t have any affiliation with Falcon, and I usually recommend other brands of controllers, but this little F Test is awesome. I bought one last year and you're able to do all kinds of stuff with them. Through any type of smart receiver, you can hook up an ethernet cable, hook it directly to a smart receiver, and run some tests on it.

If you want to check your cable there are various cable testers on the market. My number one recommendation after trying a lot of them is this yellow Sperry brand one. It’s a two-parter, one side has batteries in it and the other side doesn’t. You can pull them apart and put them at two ends of the cable. Other testers on the market I’ve found to be cheap and unreliable, and if you’re trying to test something and your test is unreliable, then you get really mad at yourself, so for just a bit more money the Sperry one is awesome.

Compatibility

After you’ve checked your cables, the next problem to consider with smart receivers is going to be compatibility. One of the things that frustrates me about smart receivers in the past few years is that there are so many variations of them, and they don’t all work together. It’s not like the previous generation of standard receivers that worked with pretty much any controller.

Now in 2024 I know on the Falcon side there are receivers that work with their newest generation of controllers, and there are receivers that work with the older generation, but they really aren’t cross- compatible with each other. There’s reasons for that, new functionalities they've built in, but it is frustrating because it makes it a lot more confusing for the person who's new to the holiday light show scene (or even if you've been around the block a few times!).

How to avoid compatibility issues

So what do we do to avoid compatibility issues? I recommend that you buy your receiver from the same place you buy your controller, and make sure that the receiver is listed from the controller vendor as compatible. There’s just so many variations on the market today, it will pay off to do your research and check compatibility when purchasing.  

Switches

After you’ve verified compatibility, next it’s time to look at switches. Every smart receiver is going to have some kind of switches on it. This one for example has a little switch that you turn with a bunch of letters and numbers, and then there's also a termination switch.

What do these mean? For the letters and numbers switches, the manufacturer should give you a guide to putting it into either some sort of automatic mode or a specific mode for the type of receiver it is. Check your manuals on that. The termination switches should all be turned on, on the last receiver in the chain.

Now as someone who's worked with protocols similar to how these controllers send to smart receivers, I'm going to tell you if you don't turn those terminators on, everything may be 100% fine, or you may run into issues. It's a wise idea to turn that on, on the last receiver. If you turn it on on a receiver that's not the last receiver, it will not pass data through its output port. So that's really important as well, and another possible issue you can troubleshoot.

Smart receivers that stop responding after a controller was restarted

Last but not least, I have found occasionally that with smart receivers and controllers, if you're troubleshooting, sometimes I've run into an issue where you have a smart receiver that's booted up and you restart a controller. Sometimes for whatever reason the smart receiver stops responding at that point. Like any good tech support, I’m going to recommend – try restarting it! See if that fixes it, as simple as it sounds, sometimes that works!

Those are the basics of troubleshooting on a smart receiver, things that are specific to receivers and don’t apply to controllers or pixel strings themselves. And if you're brand new to this hobby, then I want to get a free guide into your hands. It’s called “The Four Things I really wish I knew before I began with Christmas lighting,” and you can grab that at over at Learn Christmas Lighting. We want to help you save time, money and frustration!