timsabre

Funny how those are so variable, I've got 2 in our church pa which have been chucked around every week for 10 years and still work perfectly.

I am not sure if this uses the same pinouts as JEM machines - I think it may have been designed by JEM. If so the pinout is 1=Ready LED (open collector) 2=Ground 3=+15V output 4=Heat LED (open collector) 5=0-10V smoke control (0-1V= standby 1-10V=variable smoke) You could verify this by putting an LED with series resistor between pins 3 and 4, or 3 and 1.

Have a look on github, there's loads of artnet or sacn to Hue bridge applications to run on a networked computer. Interesting idea by z88 though, I don't think any other console manufacturers have done it.

No you won't damage anything. But beware of variable results, I've had some dimmable lamps work fine during rehearsal then start to strobe randomly when they were supposed to be off during the actual show.

Ha didn't spot that. Although Halogen GU10's last about 5 minutes so that would be the main problem.

Short answer... probably not with the dimmers you already have. Long answer, maybe, it depends on what your dimmers are - you may get problems with flickering or latch-on and you will get quite a sudden snap in when fading in from off. Dimmable LED only really dims well with trailing edge / MOSFET dimmers and nearly all theatrical dimmers are leading edge triac controlled dimmers. You can sometimes make it work better by putting a big halogen lamp on the same channel and hiding it away somewhere (a load lamp). There are DMX trailing edge dimmers such as Artistic Licence's Sundial but they are quite expensive. You can get cheaper ones from china e.g. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/254595781271 which I have used and they do work, but depends on your venue's policy on potentially dodgy electrical gear of unknown origin.

The problem with RGB mixed "white" is there's a large gap in the colour spectrum in between the red and green LEDs. Although your brain tries to fill this in and make the mix look "white", when you shine it on something coloured in the missing area (orange through to lime green) it just looks weird. Unfortunately skin tones have a lot of their colour in this range so faces lit by RGB mixed white also look very odd. As described above, adding a Lime coloured LED into the output vastly improves the mix - more than a white LED which still doesn't provide much output in the missing area. Have a google for rgb led spectrum diagrams, it's all interesting stuff.

I don't think that would be possible within the terms of the Capture licence. You'd need to hire a person who has Capture to do it for you.

Basically it turns the motor through its full possible rotation. So if the motor is at the other end of its movement it will bang the stop less times. The stops had a rubber sleeve to cushion the movement but this may have rotted away due to age.

I would say this is a rare occurrence and it wouldn't stop me hiring an x32. However I have experienced it once, it was apparently due to a loose connection on the mains feed causing an intermittent /sparky supply.

On those units it is normal for the pan/tilt to hit the stops when they initialize. That's how they got to a zero position, they didn't have sensors. Once they have finished knocking the initialization is complete. I think you have to send a DMX command to turn on the lamp, or there was some sort of setting (dip switch?) which told it to turn the lamp on automatically after startup.

The thing with Behringer is they manufacture enough quantity to make custom pots viable, so they could easily have had a high power low resistance pot made. Or indeed a weird resistance taper or something. I would have thought 200mW would be plenty, it's only going to be 200mW very intermittently unless you're blasting white noise through them all the time. Watch out for how you connect headphone ground as sometimes headphone outputs play tricks with the ground to get a larger signal, so headphone ground isn't audio ground (probably not on a desk output though).

I've PM'd Tom about this but changing libraries is often a nightmare and frequently the easiest way is to start a new project, get something very basic working then copy your previous application back in. A lot of the big microcontroller manufacturers provide their own "HAL" which sits in between your code and the hardware of the micro, these are notoriously bug ridden and badly documented. For Chris's problem, sounds like you need to do a "clean" which removes all built code and forces a rebuild from scratch. Unfortunately Arduino IDE does not offer this standard compiler feature but you can force it by changing the "Board" setting in the Tools menu to something else, attempt compile (will probably fail), then switch the board back to your correct board and compile again.

This cable will not damage anything on its own - it will work fine until you have another fault present. If you have had damage then you need to be looking for another fault - probably unwanted voltage on the DMX line caused by a power supply shorting to earth or something. The reason for not linking the plug shield to ground is to prevent large fault currents going to earth via the DMX cable. This can cause them to catch fire in an exciting way which is not what you really want.

Hi Tom, I am happy to have a look at it for you, or to help you get it going (not doing the Times crossword though) - I haven't ever used the NRF24 modules and I don't have one here, so the best I could do would be to get it to the point where it builds without errors, which might not translate to working hardware. Where are you getting stuck at the moment?

I think they are outside a scene dock door or something. Still, you would think moving to a safe distance might be wise.

Anyone poking in a Zero3000 should be aware that although cmos logic is used the whole circuit runs at mains potential to avoid the additional cost of optoisolators. Quite difficult to work on safely.

Do you mean the internal LCD screen, or the little external monitor that was provided with some desks? The external monitor was just a small VGA screen which are still fairly widely available from the internet.

For headsets, I have done some mucking about with intercom apps and if you use a phone with a 3.5mm jack you can get a splitter cable which allows you to plug a gaming headset with mic/headphones jacks into a phone. (first example off amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Splitter-POSUGEAR-Headphone-Microphone-Compatible-Black/dp/B079PJL14Y) The apps all seem to work over wifi and the problem I found was the speech latency was random and could be really high (like 2 seconds) which is obviously no good for cueing!

Bluetooth devices pair by MAC address (6 byte number) which are (supposed to be) unique to each device. The device name shown on the phone is just for info. As Tom says this does not help if you have a list of identical device names to pick from, but as far as the pairing is concerned they are different.

Most "electronically balanced" audio devices like radio mic receivers drive their outputs through bipolar electrolytic capacitors to decouple phantom power.

I am pretty sure only Pulsar used the other wiring standard. It could have been rewired to work with a pulsar desk of course. The Pulsar wiring was different to allow them to use a 5 pin din on their 3 channel packs and keep the same pin allocation

Eltec were 0 to +10v. I would expect it to use the "standard" wiring which is pins 1-6 = chans 1-6, pin 7=12v, pin8 = gnd. You can test this by checking pin 7 with a meter.

Thanks that's worth looking at. There's also QLC software which will run on the pi.

I have done this a few times and wouldn't be worried about it with 8-10KG fixtures. 2 evenly matched fixtures either side of a tripod stand, OK too. Even if you fling the fixture around there isn't that much force on the stand as a lot of the fixture weight is in the base. It will move a bit so anything else on the stand might jiggle around for a bit after a move. I wouldn't do it with a BMFL or other really heavy fixture though. As Don says, assess the risk.