Lighting board and new led lights

[Ebroach]

We have a ETC Smart Fade 24/96

We have 8 Par Can Lights, 4 ETC Ellipsoidals and 8 Chauvet Colordash Blocks.

Have been working fine and still working.

We purchased 6 more fixtures this week.

4 Chauvet Pars LED and 2 Chauvet Colorbars..

We addressed the lights per our info from our original installer.

Question.. How do we assign a light fixture to a channel on the board.

We were told that once we plugged the new fixtures that the SF 24/96 would
reach out and find them .

NADA.

is there a video on how do this.

Yes chain of lights are terminated.

[daver2]

I think the "reach out and find them" statement is wishful thinking!

The usual issue is one of patching channel faders to DMX channels. The board would have originally come probably set to 1:1 so if you added fixtures with next higher DMX addresses than your current fixtures they probably would have worked. However, if the patching is not set to 1:1 then all bets are off.

I quickly downloaded the user manual from http://www.etcconnect.com/docs/docs_...anual_revA.pdf and looked up patching on page 16 onwards.

I would first suggest following the manual to document how the patching is currently set up (if you don't already know) and take it from there.

Dave

[Esoteric]

You might want to take a read at our DMX primer:

DMX Primer

The long and short of it is that the console does not "reach out" to anything. The console sends out a signal between 0%-100% down the designated channel path. The console is stupid. It has no idea what is on the other end. Some smarter consoles allow you to tell them what is on the other end (which helps to do all sorts of fun stuff), but this console sadly never knows what is at the other end of its DMX cable.

Part of the issue here is the use of the term channel. It has three specific meanings when it comes to DMX and DMX controlled fixtures. The first is in the DMX output itself. Each DMX universe consists of 512 DMX channels. We used to call them dimmers, but that language is no longer accurate. Now most call them DMX channels. They are the actual information sent down the line. You never interact with the DMX channels directly (except when you use the dimmer check function). Then there are control channels. These tell you how many channels you have control over directly. They may or may not line up with the number of faders and may or may not line up with the number of DMX control channels. For example software consoles allow 512 control channels for 512 DMX channels. Smartfade 24/96 has 96 maximum control channels for 512 DMX channels (and it has 96 faders). Finally there are fixture channels. These are the number of channels the fixture requires to work, and what they do. For example if you set the Colordash Block to 3 channel mode, it takes 3 channels to operate, channel 1 is red, channel 2 is green, and channel 3 is blue.

The console has 1 universe of DMX. That means it has 512 channels of DMX that it can send out. But, you only have 96 control channels. What does this mean? It means that you can either

a. Only control 96 total channels of DMX

or

b. Some of the control channels must have multiple DMX channels patched to them (what we call a soft patch)

A is pretty self explanatory. The board comes in what is called a 1:1 patch. So control channel 1 controls DMX channel 1. All the way through channel 96. You just have to set the console to Full Control Mode (see page 5 of the owners manual).

Now this is where things get a little fuzzy. Because depending on the modes that the Colordash Blocks and Color Bars are set up you could be operating from as little as 54 channels up to 161 channels.

So, we would really need to know the addresses of your fixtures and what modes they are operating on.

But, lets just use an example of the 8 Colordash units. These units can be configured to a 12 channel mode. If you do this for 8 units that is 96 channels. When you add your 12 conventional channels that is 108 channels. Your console only has 96 control channels so that won't work. How do we fix this? Well, there are two ways.

The first is to hard patch the Colordash units. We physically address them in some way to reduce their DMX footprint. For example we address all the even fixtures to the same address and all the odd fixtures to the same address. So, your dimmers are 1-12, the even CDs are 13 (which means they take up 13-24) and the odds are 25 (meaning they take up 25-36). Now we are using 36 control channels and we are good to go.

The other is soft patch. So, we leave all the units addressed as they are, and we enter patch in the console (see above) and we tell the console that DMX channel 13 (the first unit, channel 1) and DMX channel 25 (second unit, channel 1) is controlled by control channel 13 (remember your 12 conventionals!) on the console. This means when you raise control channel 13 to full, whatever is controlled by channel 1 on the units (I am going to guess in 12 channel mode this would be the red diodes for the upper left hole) goes to full ON BOTH UNITS. Then you can go from there, grouping as you see fit to make everything fit into 96 control channels.

This is why I am not a fan of the Smartfade line. The whole syntax is very diluted and the lack of a monitor makes the whole thing take quite a long time. And it limits what you can do creatively by not allowing you all the control you might want.

[Ebroach]

Thanks Mike. Your observation is helpful.

Our colordash blocks are set for 5 channels dimmer R,B,G,W

Our color strips we were setting for 7 channels.

We have 8 colordashs paired in 2s which give us 4 fixtures.

12 standard -8 pars and 4 ellipsoids. Each one of these have 1 channel.

so if i understand you we are using 32 channels of our board without the
new fixtures.

We have the 6 new fixtures led. for Sunday we set the new fixtures to one color and let it be.

[Esoteric]

Okay, so we should have something like this:

Channel 1-12: conventional
Channel 13-17: CD 1&2
Channel 18-22: CD 3&4
Channel 23-27: CD 5&6
Channel 28-32: CD 7&8

Now we add your new units:

Strip 1 address 33 (uses channels 33-39)
Strip 2 address 40 (uses channels 40-46)

Make sure the patch is set 1:1 and the board is in the correct mode and away you go!

[Ebroach]

Thanks for you help..

Got it up and going..

[Esoteric]

No problem!