DMX Analyzer by REHMLIGHTS — firmware v1.4
Power on
Hold the power button until the display lights.
- Short press — screen off, or wake it again. The unit keeps running.
- Long press (2 s) — power-off dialog.
Charge over USB-C. The battery indicator sits top right on every screen. Only 18650 cells belong in the holder.
Switch off with the cable in and VERSE shows the charging display, then goes dark and stays dark - it cannot switch fully off while a charger is holding it up, so it waits instead. A button press brings it back; unplugging switches it off properly.
Connect
Either XLR works. IN and THRU are wired together, so VERSE can sit inline in a running chain without breaking it — plug it between console and rig and the show carries on.
Termination is a jumper (J3) on the board inside the case — four screws to reach it. It ships un-terminated, which is right for VERSE sitting inline. Fit it only when VERSE is the last device on the line.
The menu
| Analyze | Watch incoming DMX as a bar graph, 48 channels a page |
| Record | Capture live DMX to the SD card |
| Playback | Replay a capture back onto the line |
| Scene | Store and recall fixed looks |
| Manual | Drive channels by hand |
| RDM | Find and configure fixtures |
| Signal | Measure the health of the DMX line itself |
| Settings | Brightness, theme, timeout, DIP calculator, files, restart |
Reading a line
Analyze shows what is arriving. Bars run cyan through magenta with level.
Hold leaves a mark at each channel's highest value, so a one-frame spike is still there when you go looking. Trace turns any channel that moved recently white, which finds the one a console is actually driving.
Signal answers the harder question — whether the line is healthy, not just present. Break and mark-after-break should sit near 176 µs and 16 µs, and packet rate near 40 Hz. Min/max hold catches anything intermittent while you watch something else.
Reach for Signal when a rig flickers and everything "looks fine".
Press Watch and VERSE monitors the line unattended, logging dropouts and timing faults to the SD card with timestamps. The button turns green and the status line counts events as they are found. Leave it inline on a suspect rig and come back later — that is how an intermittent fault gets caught.
Repeated BREAK_SHORT or LONG_GAP entries with no SIGNAL_LOST between them mean a line that is marginal rather than broken, which is usually the one causing flicker.
Report
Press Report and VERSE says what it found, in plain words, with what to check first:
Timing out of spec — Occasional mis-timed packets, 418 of 1,182,400. Shortest break 61us, shortest mark 16us; the standard asks 88 and 8. Tolerant fixtures will not care, fussy ones may stutter. Worth noting rather than chasing, unless a fixture is actually misbehaving. If one is, try another console output and see whether the figures change.
It names what to check rather than what is broken, and leaves the numbers on screen so you can disagree with it. The log on the card is the evidence to show someone else.
A healthy line reports nothing at all. Any steady trickle of events means something real.
RDM
Press Discover. A sweep takes a few seconds.
Tap a fixture for its details. Address steps in 1s and 10s, Identify makes it announce itself, Mode cycles personality. Sensors load on their own.
Long-press a row to mark it (green border). Patch and Ident then act on the marked fixtures — or on all of them when nothing is marked.
Patch assigns consecutive addresses from 1, sized by each fixture's footprint, so nothing overlaps.
Discovery works best with the line to itself. If something else is transmitting - another console, or a fixture in master mode syncing to its neighbours - VERSE says Line busy and searches around it rather than giving up, but unplugging the other source is still the reliable answer.
DIP calculator
Settings → DIP Calc. Works both ways: tap switches to read off an address, or step the address and copy the switch positions onto the fixture.
Settings worth knowing
Files lists everything on the card with sizes and free space, and deletes with a confirmation - the only way to see the flicker logs without pulling the card.
Restart reboots. Firmware restarts as a USB drive so a new .uf2 can be copied on, which means updates need no screwdriver. To leave it without loading a file: unplug USB and hold the power button ten seconds.
Screen timeout runs to an hour and defaults to 30 minutes, because the screen blanking part-way through a measurement is worse than a lit screen.
Recording
Record writes to the SD card; Playback replays it. Useful for capturing a fault that only happens once, or carrying a console's output back to the shop.
If something looks wrong
| Symptom | Try |
|---|---|
| No signal | Check the cable, then confirm the console is actually outputting |
| RDM finds nothing | Unplug any other DMX source; terminate the last device |
| Only some fixtures found | Run Discover again — non-compliant fixtures sometimes need a second sweep |
| Blank model names | Normal. Many fixtures do not implement the optional name parameters |
| Flicker, but everything reads fine | Open Signal, press Watch, leave it inline, and read the log later |
| RDM says "Line busy" | Something else is transmitting. Often a fixture in master mode - they sync over DMX when they see no signal, and start the moment RDM pauses it |
| Report says "No signal seen" | Nothing arrived at all. Check the console is outputting, and that the cable is in its DMX out rather than a thru |
| Want more detail | Settings has a Diagnostics switch that adds engineering counters to the RDM and Signal screens |
Full detail in MANUAL.md. Version history in CHANGELOG.md.