Hi guys! This is my first post, I would like to thank the community here for being so polite and helpful and the people at bomebox for making this amazing product. My bomeboxes helped me to enhance the capabilities of the music hardware I use, up to replacing missing features, doing things that looked impossible at first, awesome!
I have one problem left that I can’t quite figure out: I have to manually re-connect my 3 bomeboxes sometimes.
This is my setup:
I have three boxes named red, blue, yellow (all running the latest firmware)
‘blue’ runs a translator project
the boxes are connected with cat5 cables
‘blue’ is configured as DHCP server, the other two are DHCP clients
wifi is disabled
the setup is meant to run without a PC/laptop
there is no connection to any other network
I cannot control in which order the boxes are powered on in a live situation
Sometimes (like, 60% of the time) everything just works. But sometimes I have to re-establish connections in the ‘Network MIDI’ tab of the web config. Normally in this tab every of the three boxes should show the other two with Status ‘Connected’. But sometimes the status after powering on is ‘pending’, and I have to press the button ‘Connect’ to re-establish the connection. Sometimes it is even necessary to first cancel the connection and then re-initate it from this screen.
The good thing is that the network layer seems to be super stable. I can always reach the webconfig of all 3 boxes by plugging in an ipad to the ethernet port of one box. Also with this setup the boxes keep having the same ip adress, which is handy.
I tried to find a way to reproduce the problem reliably, but with no success. I tried every combination of powering things on and of and plugging or unplugging the cat5 cable between two of the boxes. It nearly seems as if the problem arises more often after transport and setting things up in a new place (I know, that’s really unlikely). When I try to reproduce the behavior at home after a while everything works just fine and as it should. So I have no process for a reliable re-produce. But the problem occurs frequent enough to be able to grab the logs for example.
I assume you are running firmware version 1.5.2 which had a bugfix:
bugfix: fix rare problems when re-establishing MIDI network pairing
If so, then my experience has been that it is more reliable if you always start the pairing in the same order. The BomeBox should “remember” which connections it previously accepted and then accept them again, however if there is an initiation of pairing in both directions (since the pairing order had been changed), sometime multiple BomeBoxes will initiate the pairing. I suggest the following order (but any order should work as long as it is always the same.
First, disconnect all devices so that nothing is connected.
Initialize Pairing between Blue and and Red (accept the connection with Red)
Initialize Pairing between Blue and Yellow (accept the connection with Yellow)
Initialize Paring between Yellow and Red (accept the connection with Red)
Again the order is not important as long as it is always the same so that each device remembers whether it is the initiator or the acceptor.
Now with all of that said, there may still be some work going on to improve the connection process so if it is still unreliable, let us know and we can continue to work on it, especially if you are running BomeBox firmware 1.5.2. My recommendations primarily come from my experience in connecting computers running Bome Network Pro together. I have no way to test this since I’m only running 2 BomeBoxes but our developer does so I will make sure he is notified of this post and can chime in if need be.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz
and thanks for your fast and thorough response. What you suggest is actually relatively straightforward to do, I tried it and ran a couple of tests, switching things on and off, unplugging and re-plugging cables and so on. Until now connection handshake worked every time, so so far it’s looking great, thanks a lot!
You are right, all my boxes run on 1.5.2 currently. My experiences with this problem go back a while, so in the past the bug you mentioned might have added to the instability. Good that it is fixed by now.
In the coming weeks I have some rehearsals and shows, so a lot of testing ‘in the wild’. I will report back later how it went.
Hi Frank, this is a serious issue!
If you experience this problem again, could you please grab the Log from the web config and post it here (or send to us via private message)? Ideally, post the Log from both BomeBoxes involved in the missing pairing.
Thanks!
I can say that your tips solved the problem. I started up my setup hundreds of times in several places, the described problem didn’t occur anymore. One time I had to replace one box, then it was there again, but after updating the box to 1.5.2 and repeating the procedure as described handshake was 100% stable again.
So thanks again for the help!
Actually by this being so stable I found out that there was a second problem in my setup from a device which stopped sending midi under certain circumstances. I think I attributed these dropouts falsely to the connection issue sometimes, because this could look the same. Now that connection is stable I was finally able to isolate this other problem and even reproduce it at home, which is great of course.
