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This isn't going to be a long one, but TLDR, update your MAC250 E/K/W firmware to 1.8 if it's crashing during lamp strike.
Basically, I bought some MAC250 Entours recently, and found that a few of them had this persistent problem where a cold lamp strike would result in the light going unresponsive and displaying "NIE" in a rather comical fashion on the screen.
Martin's documentation doesn't really speak much to what this error means. In fact, only the MAC250 wash manual mentions its existence. Luckily, it gives us a lot of information in only a few words.
Yeah, so the light's computer is crashing.
Now, my understanding is that a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) is generally used in pretty dire circumstances to deal with an error. It's basically a trigger telling to the CPU to quit anything it's doing, no matter what, and run a set routine, which in this case seems to be: Display "NIE" on the screen, and halt execution.
My assumption, from the way the MAC's display goes totally berserk during lamp strike, is that either the inrush current that the ballast draws when starting from cold, or EMF from the sudden burst of power to the lamp, is causing some momentary difficulty for the signalling between components in the light's computer, resulting in a crash.
Basically all you'd really need to do is have the CPU sleep for a little bit during lamp on to allow the power to settle before continuing to process instructions, and wouldn't you know it, they updated the firmware to fix up the issue, or at least band-aid it. Now if you get a crash, the fixture will at least reboot itself instead of hanging endlessly.
If you're running firmware version 1.6 or later, you shouldn't find yourself experiencing this problem, and if you're on 1.5 or earlier, you may want to update.
Now Martin have made this both very easy, and very difficult for us to do this.
Their update/management software, called Martin Companion, is beautiful, and gives you every firmware version for every Martin fixture ever all in one place. Unfortunately, the Martin Companion upload cable is expensive and a little annoying to source.
HOWEVER, turns out you can use any old Martin branded interface with companion (though I actually didn't end up having any luck with this!) so break out the old LightJockey interface and let's get uploading! If you don't have one, and you're local, get in touch and I might be able to help you out :)
You can grab a copy of the Martin Companion software from here: https://www.martin.com/en/products/martin-companion#downloads
Unfortunately the software is limited to Windows machines only, so make sure you at least have a virtual-machine with Windows handy.
Now here's the thing. After everything I've just said, I couldn't actually get it to work with my old Martin USB Duo DMX interface. The furthest it would get is putting the lights in DFU mode, then it would give up :\
Never fear though, legacy software to the rescue!
I ended up installing Martin USB Tools v1.1, which was the original software suite built for the "legacy" Martin USB interfaces, which includes the old firmware update utility, which I must say still works very nicely! It even found and populated all of the firmwares that Martin Companion had downloaded automatically. How cool is that?!
USB Tools v1.1 is available here: https://www.martin.com/en/softwares/martin-usb-tools-v1-1-windows
Happy updating!
P.S. Ain't never had nothin' like this happen with my OG 250s and 250+s. True fighters!
Michael :)
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