timsabre

I assume he wants to keystone a capture of his computer screen. OBS is a good suggestion. But would need a second screen to run obs while the other screen is being captured. 

I assume you mean pixel tape? The problem with controlling pixel tape by DMX is it uses up DMX universes like they are going out of fashion because every pixel takes 3 DMX channels. So unless you have a massive lighting desk you need some sort of macro pattern controller for the tape where you just tell it to do a pattern using a few DMX channels, and the controller goes off and does it.

examples - enttec pixie or pixelator https://www.enttec.co.uk/range/pixel/pixel-control/

I've designed one for Abstract but I'm not sure if they are buyable at the moment https://www.digitaltape.co.uk/about-pixels

If you are into homebrew there are quite a lot of projects using Arduino or ESP32 to control pixels e.g. Wled https://kno.wled.ge/ will take Artnet over wifi

John, your setup looks really good and gets some nice shots. I would really recommend adding a stereo pair of ambience mics into your audio mix for the songs which lets people at home hear the congregation singing and helps them feel more part of the service, it's surprising the difference this makes to the "feel" of the livestream.

We meet in a school hall and have to set up and derig each week. All equipment and cabling has to be put in and removed so this limits what is feasible to do - I have 3 android phones running Droidcam on cheap PTZ mounts from Amazon. The phones run off USB power banks and connect to OBS over wifi (we have to bring our own 4G wifi router as well as the school will not allow us to connect to their network). This allows all 3 cameras to be wireless which really reduces the setup and derig time. The wifi links sometimes drop a few frames but the intention is just to allow church members who are at home due to illness etc to join in, so I consider the balance of effort/quality is acceptable. Sound is fed from our XR16 with a couple of old Tandy PZM mics for room ambience, the ambience feed is gated on the XR16 using a control signal from the piano so that when someone plays the piano for a song, the ambience mics automatically turn up, then reduce again at the end of the song to make the talky bits less echoey.

1 hour ago, sunray said:

What's happened with the DMX connectors?

I'd guesss the manufacturer bought a job lot that didn't fit the PCB

Thanks Samtex that is really interesting to know how others do it. That looks like a nice camera, what is the PTZ movement like - e.g. can you make slow moves with it when you realise that the person speaking is a bit taller than you expected? Where did you buy it from?

As you say it is definitely worth having a PC with nvidia card to use the NVENC option in OBS. We added a suitable graphics card into our streaming PC which dropped the CPU load from 65% (dropping frames sometimes) down to 10%.

It depends what you are doing, for a village hall disco as specified by the original post, where you just want fluorescent colours to "pop" then the LED stuff is fine and the purple visible light output wouldn't really matter. Those fixtures originally suggested would not cover a 16x10m hall though, you'd need a lot more than 4 of them.

I agree if you are trying to do a panto blacklight scene (does anyone do these any more?) the visible light output from UV LED would spoil the effect.

Thanks for coming back with the results.

What is your camera just out of interest and what delay do you get on the picture? What are you recording onto?

I am also recording and livestreaming our church services but I'm using surplus Android phones with Droidcam into OBS.

Post a photo of the faulty PSU module. Unless it is something esoteric with many different outputs, there will probably be some generic module you can replace it with.

I have used one in a sensory room setup, beam spread is massive but (as a result) they are not very bright. The sensory room was about 16ft square with a low 8ft ceiling and the effect was good in there, with no other light on and the fixture in the centre of the ceiling. How big is your village hall?

As Hippy says if this is a one off you would do better hiring something a bit more powerful.

Correct termination for audio as well has a 200R resistor + 10uF capacitor in parallel with the 4K7 resistor. You should probably include that to prevent any audio weirdness on your branch line

http://www.dmx512.com/web/comms/tecpro/tptech.htm

The perfect height is to put it at the eye height of the person speaking. Anything else will look strange and the further off eye height you are, the stranger it will look. This is why at professionally recorded events you will often see cameras on a platform in the middle of the audience.

Obviously you will have a compromise with what is actually physically possible - if you already have the camera, get it into the proposed position and see if you can live with the picture you get. If you don't have the camera, use your phone to get some test shots. If you have an android phone you can use Droidcam-OBS app (free version) to livestream into OBS software (free) from your phone camera as a test.

 

On 1/5/2023 at 1:50 AM, sunray said:

My one attempt without it and without using any audio, the call light appeared to be fully functional. Looks like I was lucky, Thanks

Might depend on the manufacturer maybe? Normally the call light button puts a DC offset on the audio line. This is ramped up and down fairly slowly to avoid a click on the audio. The DC termination is involved in the time constant of this ramp, without the termination it goes up very quickly (hence the click you heard) and down very slowly, so the call light might stay on for ages.

It doesn't die or anything with 2 terminations. The effect is that the call light doesn't work or only flashes if you hold the button down (normally it would continue for a time after you release the button). And the sidetone settings (how much you hear yourself in your own headset) all become different to what they normally are.

With no termination the call light sometimes flashes all the time once the button has been pressed, or flashes by itself, or doesn't work at all. And the sidetone becomes totally unpredictable, lots of headset feedback etc.

This is correct, the double termination would cause problems. The termination has an ac component for the audio and a dc component for the call lights - using a transformer would fix the dc problem but the double audio termination would still be there. 

Probably not as most manufacturers use a custom protocol for sound to light mode. But you could try plugging them together and see what happens? 

I've not seen one either but I suspect given the statement "80W equivalent" that it is using WS2812 pixel LEDs as the light source, rather than the normal 3W RGB led you get in LED par cans etc (which would be at least 144 "real" Watts). So I think it will not be very bright - think of 80cm of pixel tape...

Perhaps it is time to reveal this secret code in the public domain, if you manage to find out what it is... There can't be many qcommanders out there any more and it sounds like the information is in danger of being lost forever

There's definitely something weird about the order of the connections in that cable.
From your pic it looks like the left two pins (which you have labelled Red+Green) are the supply to the opto, the middle one is the decoded+optoisolated DMX data signal, and the right hand two are the isolated supply to the 75176.

You've remade that cable, are you sure you have remade it correctly and not mirrored one end?

Thanks all. What they're actually proposing is having bars on the east side of some pillars to make them less visible so rather like pstewart's image. But probably using derig arms to hang fixtures. 

Rewinding a bit, when you say it doesn't POST, how are you determining that? Could it be a display output problem or similar?

Hi, I am trying to explain to a group of church people who have never seen lights mounted on a vertical boom what this would look like. My google ability is failing me as I cannot find a photo of lights rigged on a fixed boom (e.g. behind prosc in a theatre or on a FOH wall). There are a couple showing tank traps but I really need a photo of a permanently installed one.

Does anyone have such a photo (or is better at Google than me)? Bonus points if it is mounted to a pillar in a church! Needs to show a single pipe not truss.

I've got a Siglent SDS1104X-E but that picture isn't mine, however it looks pretty similar on the screen. £379 in the UK, it is a good bit of kit for the money.

No, having multiple notes together would work, but as you start adding more channels to control, they will not all happen at the same time, as it takes a few milliseconds to send each MIDI command. This is most noticeable with fast flashing, and if you need to do a fade it can look steppy. 12 dimmer channels and 2 LED pars would not be a problem. I still think it wouldn't be very nice to program on cubase in the way you are suggesting though.

DMX through a scope looks like this at pin 1 of the 75176 (the yellow trace). The long "low" at the beginning is the breaktime which is used to detect the start of the packet

The differential signal into pins 6+7 looks the same except one of them is upside down. Also the signal may be a lot smaller and have noise / wiggles on it.

(picture from https://community.element14.com/technologies/open-source-hardware/b/blog/posts/DMX-explained-dmx512-and-rs-485-protocol-detail-for-lighting-applications

which is a good read for DMX background info)

If you have an oscilloscope, trace the DMX through from the sockets to the mainboard. It goes into pins 6+7 as a differential signal and should come out on pin 1 as a normal serial data stream. Most likely, in common with all DMX devices, the 75176 has got blown up.