timsabre

Yes... (will attempt drawing) Loop 1 pin 2 -----|>|-------| O -------- pin 2 to beltpack Loop 2 pin 2 -----|>|-------|

This is a difficult modification - your 2 challenges are optical, as the optical system is designed for a point-source arc lamp not a larger LED array, and thermal as you must get the heat away from the LED or it will have a short life. It is not just a case of bolting an LED in place of the lamp. See gyro gearloose's post at the top of this thread - he said "The other problem with Mac 600s is that the original discharge lamp uses a huge heatsink that gets in the way of fitting the LED and it’s own heatsink. I’m not sure how you could use the existing heatsink to cool the LED as you would need to mount the LED somewhere near to the focal point of the reflector otherwise you risk losing a lot of light output. You could remove the existing reflector and use the LED/holder/reflector optics that I mentioned in my post from last year, but fitting them in the Martin heatsink might be tricky."

You can nearly always find one that someone else has made, that works with your device. 2 useful websites for finding matching fixtures are: Avolites fixture finder (https://www.avolites.de/downloads/d4find/) Onyx fixture finder (https://onyxfixturefinder.com/) Basically you tell it what parameters are on each DMX slot and it shows you all the other fixtures that match your one. They both show links to libraries for the particular console (Avolites / Obsidian) but it's not too hard to use the info to find a matching fixture in other libraries.

The diagram you linked to at the top was for connecting 2 single channel beltpacks to dual channel loop wiring which is the opposite of what you want to do. To connect a dual channel beltpack to 2x single channel loops, which I think is what you are wanting, you need to take power (pin2) from only one of the single chan systems, otherwise you link the power supplies together and this will cause bother as you experienced. You need to wire as Sunray's top picture (ignoring the 3rd XLR3 connector). (If you need to get power from either of the single channel loops, you can use 1n4001 diodes to link the power together from the 2 loops)

As Dave suggests Cat5 cabling is not as robust as DMX cabling using XLR connectors. If this is a rig that only gets changed infrequently then should be fine. If it's in and out every day then personally I would avoid using Cat5 with XLR adaptors as you'll get faults due to bad connections or broken conductors. (I'm assuming you have normal network-style Cat5 cable and not tour grade Cat5 with ethercon connectors. That would be a different answer)

The Jem/Martin smoke machines are usually robust. Still built in the same Jem factory in Lincolnshire despite the Martin/Harman takeover. I wonder, would they really be better with a good hazer - can give a much more consistent "club atmosphere".

My android tablet runs down faster than it can charge when running mixing station so a charger / usb power bank is no help if it's got low battery. I think it's time to get on ebay for a more recent tablet maybe!

Sounds like a good plan. I've never needed wired backup in the 5yrs we've been using a tablet for control. Had a couple of mysterious "loss of connection" incidents both of which fortunately happened before the church service started.

I use an ancient Lenovo tablet with XR16 + Mixing station and it works fine with little change from standard Android settings. Mixing station has its own settings for screen timeout etc so you don't need to change any of that in Android. Creating a google account for it is a good idea otherwise you can get notifications from your normal google account (even after you spend ages trying to switch them all off). Make sure you remember to charge it up before you need it... have Mixing Station installed on a backup device just in case - I had a few bad days where I found out too late that it has failed to charge and had to mix on my phone. How are you doing the wifi for the XR12? The unit's inbuilt wifi can struggle in a room with a lot of people, an external wireless access point can be better. Hide the SSID on the AP so that everyone's phones aren't polling it all the time.

4 pins will probably be positive power, then negative R, G, B. The driver box just switching the negative side of the power to the LEDs. As musht says your X-power driver is a constant current driver for six 1W-type LEDs in series. It won't work to drive 12V or 24V constant voltage LED.

Usually with tarps the eyelets rip out before the fixings fail anyway.

Not really. I get involved in a lot of church AV installs where the standard advice has previously been to hot glue cabling to the wall to avoid damaging the ancient stonework by hammering in cable clips. Mostly this runs down the side wall of the building where it would not be a hazard to anyone if it fell to the floor. But where it crosses a doorway or walkway or corridor, they have changed the advice to use metal fire clips or metal trunking. It's just going back to the old chestnut of assessing the risk in each situation - the intention of that regulation is to avoid firefighters becoming entangled in fallen cabling during rescues (as happened a few times). I think the OP was really thinking about falling equipment. I have seen plenty of stuff ratchet-strapped to trees and things, which has the same problem with fire resistance, also cable ties are widely used in temporary staging for securing tarps and small bits of structure etc. If the cable ties are appropriately sized and it isn't going to fall on someone in a fire then I would think it's OK.

I would recommend going with something DMX. There is nothing "mains dimmed" that will fade smoothly to black, if that's what you are looking for. You don't say how bright or big it needs to be but I have seen these Eurolite fixtures used as houselights (just an example supplier). They have 2x35W led, light output is about equivalent to a 300W par56 fixture and beam angle is also similar to a par56 MFL. https://www.bax-shop.co.uk/led-bar/eurolite-led-cbb-2-cob-ww-bar

Does this unit have a fluid sensor module on the end of the pipe, if so check for damage to the sensor or wiring, and give the sensor a good cleanout with deionised water and/or isopropanol.

That machine has to take the prize for having the most unintuitive user interface on any DMX device ever. Although Ayrton fixtures have a pretty weird menu system too.

Also, aside from the electrical power considerations, you may need to reconfigure the dimmer's control circuitry in some way to work on single phase if it has been previously used on three phase. The trigger timing for the triacs is different for 3 phase power - some dimmers handle this automatically but some need PCB jumpers or software/menu options to be changed. Like Sunray I cannot find any info on these dimmers so it's difficult to know how old they are.

So like a lightbox then with the tape all round? If you can make the frames with a bit of a reveal round the front so the LEDs are concealed from view, you will make your job easier with the diffusion. Paint the inside matt white. If you can, give them a reasonable depth (e.g. 60mm) for the light to bounce around in, as it will look more even.

yes the question is not very clear... if you are ditching MA altogether and just want a basic lighting controller running on a Pi triggered by streamdeck, then QLC+ will do that. However you will need to program the lighting from scratch on QLC+ and if you are used to MA you will find programming a bit of a challenge, like you've gone back a decade or so.

What are you actually trying to make and what is the diffuser for?

Um... is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your setup which would help our answers? OBS can pretty much do everything V-Mix can, but it depends what else you are doing with V-Mix. Searching the vmix forum it looks like you can do this within V-mix with a bit of messing about, using the source rotation function (click settings cog for the input) https://forums.vmix.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=2280

OBS could do this using a plugin - see https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/corner-pin.1474/

Happy to talk you through Artnet if you want, PM me. It requires a bit of a shift in thinking but is very straightforward once you get your head round how it works.

Wled is great but I don't know of a complete thing you can buy. You need to be happy with how to burn firmware into an esp32 and assembling shields etc. It's a steep learning curve if you've not done it before.

No, your link does not work

I'm not sure how the first unit Alister suggested works as it's only got standard DMX in which limits it to 170 pixels if every pixel is independently controlled. But if that's enough for you it would be a good solution.