Neptune VDM

D

Deanb

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Im having a hard time getting my head around how this works. I have a 0-10v wire coming off my led drivers for all the blues and same for the whites. My understanding according to the diagram is in v2/v4 I can run the blues and whites and then in v1/v3 i can run a tunze or something. Am I correct or do the blues and whites have to have separate ports?

Pin Apex RJ-45 Usage
1 0-10vdc V2 and V4
2 Ground
3
4
5 0-10vdc V1 and V3
6 Ground
7
8
 
Each jack has two independent controls (pins 1 and 2, and pins 5 and 6); each can be controlled independently. So you can (for example) put your blues on 1 & 2, and your whites on 5 & 6 of the same jack, and use the second jack for two independent channels of Tunze control. The first jack will be channels 1 and 2, and the second will be channels 3 and 4.

A couple of other notes -- if you buy the lighting control cable from Neptune rather than building it, the color coding is backwards from what you'd assume -- positive is on black, negative on red; you can run multiple meanwell (and I assume other 0-10v lighting drivers) from a single channel (ie: two or three drivers of blue LEDs on one, two or three whites on another). Similarly, you can use a "Y" cable to put multiple Tunze drivers on a channel. All drivers (meanwell or tunze) on a single channel will do the same thing simultaneously.
 
@Deanb wrote:
Thank you that helps. Have you had any problems with yours putting out a stray voltage said:
I'm not sure what you mean by stray voltage, but the variable ports on the base units of both of my Apexes are defective, putting out between about 2 and 14 volts pretty much regardless of what they're set to. Judging by reports of others on the Neptune forum on RC, I'm far from the only one with this problem (although it appears to be mostly in older units). Since I didn't want to send either of my base units back for repair, I added VDMs to each, and the VDMs have worked without problems.
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@Deanb wrote:
i was going to bulid a Zener Diode voltage regulator to help prevent that said:
You might prevent it from going over 10 volts, but that won't help to make it actually controllable, at least not in the failure mode mine appear to be in. My first base unit worked fine for awhile, and when it started doing this, Neptune support told me that it was probably due to having mis-wired a cable causing port damage (which certainly could have happened). When I tested my second unit and found the same problem, the variable ports had never been used, and the only thing I'd ever plugged into it was the official neptune cable I was using to test. I've not had any similar issues with the VDMs, nor have I seen anyone else report such (although I could have missed it), but a voltage regulator to keep it from throwing greater than 10 volts and possibly blowing a string of emitters would still be pretty cheap insurance.
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@ChuckLawson wrote:
[I]@Deanb wrote:[/I][quote=" but a voltage regulator to keep it from throwing greater than 10 volts and possibly blowing a string of emitters would still be pretty cheap insurance. said:
"]
I thought the issue with greater than 10V was that this input to the driver caused an overcurrent to the led's, which is what took them out. Normally if you have properly adjusted the driver and only run your led's at 85%, you have leeway. It is also a good idea to measure the 100% output voltage of your Apex, if it's greater than 10V then either send it in or lower the output until it it at 10V...this will be your new "calibrated" full output level (i.e. 94% = 10V) . Or you could put a simple fuse on the input of each string to prevent overcurrent issues.

Cheers,
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@Deanb wrote:
i was planning on keeping them at 75% or so. No problems their im guessing said:
The drive current will do less damage than the excess heat caused by higher current so having a heat sink that will adequtely dissapate the heat is pretty important. I think it is still a very good idea to see whats coming out of your Apex, so you can make sure you properly setup your meanwell driver. Meanwell drivers run pretty dang warm also.

Cheers,
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