georgeman

 

I've ordered some 200w chips that match the colour temp and CRI of the original lamps in a hops to get the best possible match for cmy mixing... how well that will go nobody knows ha!

 

 

Can you post a link to where you bought your 200W chips?

Cheers

Gerry

Hi Gerry,

I've actually got them from Alibaba. It's a bit of a pain if you're not used to it but if you don't mind messaging some suppliers you get a good deal and can specify exactly what you want! For example the LEDs I've gone for in the first instance are 150w (not 200 as I thought), 7200k (same as the lamp in the Mac 600), and above 85 CRI (same as original lamp). I just told an LED manufacturer what I wanted and then they can supply it.

When you only buy one or two items the shipping costs mean you don't save much but you can at least specify exactly what you want. When it's something as light as an LED, you can ship a fair few without bumping up the shipping cost much. Drivers weigh more so add a bit to the shipping but often you can find them here in the UK

It's not something that I've particularly dug into, but, as someone who finds LED stage lamps extremely uncomfortable to look into, I do wonder if 'home-brew' LED conversions like this are particularly safe, from an optical safety/optical radiation point of view? The light sources themselves may be 'fine' as manufactured, but does this still stand when putting them behind various lens systems without the sort of testing that say, a Mac Encore, will have been through?

 

I've only quickly glanced through it, but this document seems to give a little bit of food for thought. Maybe @BigClive would be able to shed some light (boom boom!) on the subject if he swings by?

 

Interesting read. From what I understood from the document the biggest concern is the perceived risk of LED lights emitting more blue light than incandescent lamps. As the document said this was a side effect of early and poorly made LEDs but with decent units it's not an issue.

In terms of looking directly at the light, My understanding is that if you have a similar lumin output, the risk is the same as looking at an incandescent lamp. For example, a 150w led will be roughly the same as looking straight into a 600w filament... in other words, not advised!

What I am most interested in is the flicker effect, especially from a fast moving head light. My hope is that with the right driver, the frequency should be high enough so as to not notice anything but I am dubious... we will see when I test it!

Hey all, I've just taken the 600 apart and got all the lamp parts out... Good news is there is loads more space in there for an LED than I thought!

 

I'll keep you updated as I get the components in to do the conversion

 

Would love to see this, as I have a few 'cheaper' 575w moving head spots that I was looking at turning to LED (potentially 180w chip). Let us know if you have any luck :-)

So far I've got everything apart and removed the ballast (electronic version) and ignitor from the head. I'm waiting on LED parts but I have some cheap 100w led chips that I'm tempted to throw in as is!

I've ordered some 200w chips that match the colour temp and CRI of the original lamps in a hops to get the best possible match for cmy mixing... how well that will go nobody knows ha!

The annoying thing I've found about the Mac 600 is the need to completely remove the head from the Yoke to get into the lamp housing. As I will no longer have a lamp coming in from the back my plan is to have a fan mounted in that hole to bring in air!

Hey all, I've just taken the 600 apart and got all the lamp parts out... Good news is there is loads more space in there for an LED than I thought!

I'll keep you updated as I get the components in to do the conversion

Thanks for all your help!

I wanted to avoid too many unnecessary steps but as you say it is all relatively self explanatory!

I'll be back if I have any issues ha!

Hi All,

Just got a mac 2k profile that needs a general clean up inside and out but want to make sure I'm doing everything right.

I cant find a specific service manual for the profile online, does anyone out there have a copy?

I replaced the lamps in some Clay Paky Miniscans with LEDs a few years ago. I first wrote about it here 8 years ago! Things have moved on with LEDs since then, and I've been keeping an eye on LED development with a view to converting some moving heads at some point.

 

Last year I put up a list of parts I was looking at to use in any potential conversion. I haven't managed to find any fixtures to convert, and with the current situation I've put any such project on the back burner for now.

 

As for converting your Mac 600, there are a few issues with them that would put me off converting that particular fixture. You say you would be using the fixture in a small space, so you might need a wide beam angle depending on how much of the space you want to light. Unfortunately the standard Mac 600 lens is 25 degrees, but the frost wheels might help with that.

 

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.

 

Hope this helps.

Really interesting input thank you! I will be sure to read your original post!

I hadn't thought about the 600 original heatsink... that's a brain scratcher until I get the light in front of me! In terms of the beam angle, the light would be in a school theatre... so not a tiny space but it definitely doesn't need to be as bright as the original 600 as most of the rig is pretty old and dim! This is really more of a proof of concept for me so if it does work and the beam ends up being too narrow then it will just be a quirky fixture!

How did you find the real world light output of the LED compared to the original lamp in terms of brightness?

Hi All,

I have been offered an old mac 600 for free as the lamp isn't striking and I wondered if anyone out there has replaced the lamp in a moving head with an led? I don't need to to be as bright as the original 600 as, if it works, it will be used in a pretty small space compared to what the 600 is designed for!

I have built a fair few things with high powered LED chips before but never tried to put one in a moving head so would love to hear your thoughts and see if anyone has done it before!

Cheers in advance!

What sort of power are you looking for? Is it to light something up or just act as a feature light?

There are loads of things available, some theatre grade and others more basic... but if it's just as a feature why not get 5m rgb led strip and wrap it around the inside. You would get a cool effect and can be controllable from your phone!

With the Robe implementation the remote followspot sits between the console and the fixture(s) being controlled where the connection from the console to the remote followspot is by ethernet (requires consoles that support DMX over ethernet protocols). The fixtures are then connected to the remote followspot unit just like you would connect them to the console. The DMX information from the console passes through the remote to the fixtures. If the fixtures receive the relevant commands then they will listen to the remote for the relevant information. Beyond that I don't know exactly how it works but I guess you could say the remote unit functions more like a switch rather than a merge.

Ohhh ok so in theory if the students RGB controller had DMX in and out, the desk commands could pass through the rgb controller thing and carry on to the rig. The changes would only happen IF the values were amended by the rgb controller? Or is this pass through only available to ethernet devices?

I don't know which remote followspots you have been looking at but the Robe ones have control functions written in the DMX firmware of the fixtures which enables/disables the local controls. Taking the Robe Robin BMFL Blade as an example if you send value 0 on channel offset 6 then immediately go to any value from 240-244 inclusive and hold for a number of seconds then return straight back to zero the light will use the local controls on the unit for certain functions and ignore the associated DMX controls. Control can be swapped back in a similar way. They also have options to determine which controls are permitted, for example just pan/tilt so the remote followspot op just determines the positions and the console can control everything else including intensity.

I've seen it talked about by SpotDrive, but it sounde like a similar thing! So the followspot must be connected to the desk, with the ability to take control of the lights. How would this be done? with a DMX Merger? Or another way?

Why not just unplug the current desk?

I hadn't thought of that! That would certainly provide access to all of the DMX fixtures!

I'm really interested now though... in doing some googling I came across a remote followspot unit (for controlling moving heads as if they are a followspot) that allows you to control the lights during a show, and then pass back control of the lights for scenes where they are not needed. Would that just be a DMX merger then? How would they have 5 or 6 being used at once? a merger in each one?

So teh main reason I suggested teh ability to connect to the rig is we have 1 RGB par in a store room that he can connect into directly... everything else is in the rig. RGB pars and some relatively cheap moving heads.

Due to the unique way the school decided to fund the drama department, we have no means of getting the lights down from the rig until they do their yearly show, when they rent a cherry picker! So for now, the only way to control more than 1 light is to link it to the desk.

Perhaps you're right that it makes a bit more sense now for the student to adapt it for moving heads as touch screen is really intuitive, especially for kids who play on their phones all day long! They took a long time to get used to positioning the lights with two linear sliders so some sort of joystick would be good!

But again, the moving heads are in the rig!

thanks everyone for your thoughts, it probably would have been better advice to look at movers rather than rig integration but it was the end of a long day, clearly my brain was mis-firing! I'll chat to him again tomorrow, it might be that he is keen to design a merger as well! If not I'll suggest a cheap moving head.

With an HTP merger, as long as the desk values were set to 0, could you control a moving head through HTP? Until this thread I didn't know there was a difference! As a photographer I work visually so usually help out with design rather than the tech side!

You think HTP would be better than LTP? If it was LTP wouldn't the desk just take control when it issued a new command? or have I understood it wrong?

 

 

If your student changed to using an Arduino with two serial ports e.g. 1284 then it would be possible to modify the arduino project to read in the DMX from the bullfrog, overwrite the colour channels he wants to set then output the whole thing again to the stage. This is adding a lot of complexity to the existing project though.

 

This sounds interesting! I have no idea what it means but he might! I will do some googling!

How does HTP work with light position for moving heads? He was talking about a future project of making a digital joystick to be able to control moving heads that way. Would that need to be done with LTP? As a standalone unit I can see how it would work but not linked into a desk with HTP... unless all levels are set to 0 on the desk...Again, I know there are lots of desks out there that do this anyway but I'm never one to suppress creativity and inventiveness!

I work with a local ADS, we have a old 12ch analogue dimmer rack and controller. And a low budget.

 

Over the last couple of years I've picked up some DMX controlled LED washes and a couple of "disco lights"

Having limited budget and limited space at the desk end of things, I developed a Arduino controller, so I understand the limitations.

Arduino + DMX shield costs about £50 add a few buttons and a couple of hours programming.... Woosh (10 hours later)

I use a matrix of 12 push buttons and two potentiometers to recall hard coded scenes with the ability to alter parameters on the fly with the pots.

I can also control smoke machines and our UV fluorescent tubes as well as a simple cue light.

If / when our lighting desk technician is ill or decides he wants to act in scene 2, I can send serial commands from my laptop running Multiplay to automate the whole damn thing.

 

Merging the DMX might work, though Ive noticed that some lights arnt happy with the Arduinos slow refresh rate.

Perhaps he could add a feature to "Save" settings either to the Arduinos volatile memory or to a added SD card for recall later.

Perhaps he could look into reading DMX data with the Arduino, and display numeric data for each channel?

 

T

So do you run your arduino DMX controller alongside your physical desk? How is it integrated?

 

 

Only if you can spend money on it - buy this for £85

 

https://www.thomann....erge_dm2512.htm

This is an "HTP" merger, so DMX control for each channel will come from input A, unless that channel has a higher value on input B.

That means you need to keep the colour channels outputting at zero on your main desk - which may or may not be easy - what manufacture/model is the other desk?

 

 

or... see this video where someone has made a merger using an Arduino. That is probably a project in itself however.

The desk they currently have is an old zero88 bullfrog! Clunky and a bit slow but the majority of the lights are analogue tungsten stuff!

You think HTP would be better than LTP? If it was LTP wouldn't the desk just take control when it issued a new command? or have I understood it wrong?

I'll suggest to the student looking into making a merger. Given that he made a touchscreen RGB controller at age 13, it would probably interest him!

An interesting piece of building and coding, BUT also an example of how much more is needed to make a functional controller. A clever controller will have inbuilt personalities for different fittings of single to twenty(ish) channels and ways of setting up automated shows and cue stack shows each with dozens of scene change micros. Why people swear by (or at) different desks is their suitability for different tasks, what suits busking a show for a one off band night may not suit a long run theatre drama with lots of scene change cues.

I completely agree! There is a lot more needed to make it half as functional as the £20 DMX desk I have sat next to me!

In theory the student can input multiple addresses and control multiple lights at once but the limited memory means saving scenes is a no go at the moment. Maybe that would be a better extension of the project!

Any thoughts on how one might link his controller with the main desk? I know it's not the most efficient way to do it but for the sake of this project do you know a way?

As I say this is an extended student project rather than a commercial use case.

But perhaps the fact led lights are different colours could give the student a reason for 'on the fly colour mixing' when it comes to writing it all up.

Thanks for all the replies! I'll look into a DMX merger.

It's a student project to programme something to get a physical output... tick! He can get lights to colour mix based on a touch screen colour wheel!

Phase 2 of the project is improving the item, not necessarily for commercial purposes and making it really useful for a show, but more to show that the student has thought of further development and added in the new code.

The issue I saw with his device is that you had to physically connect to each light to be able to operate it. So irrespective of its use within a show, I thought it would be useful to be able to change the colour of ANY light in the rig that is currently wired into the desk.

So I guess LTP would be the way to do it.

At a push, for actual 'show' use, maybe its purpose would be to hijack the colour settings for a light to adjust them on the fly. It would be great if the light is controlled by the desk for the entirety of the show, until the colour needs on the spot tweaking, then the new device takes over and starts issuing commands. It then remains sending commands until the desk sends the next one.... or something like that.

Obviously for an actual show that is pretty useless and it would be programmed before hand but I'm just coming up with hypotheticals for the sake of this project...

I've seen systems for remote follow spot that do something similar, they have a button to take over control and then send it back to the desk again when they're finished using the moving head as a follow spot! How would that be done?

Hi All,

I help my old school with the technical side of their productions, mostly in a LD capacity! Anyway a student came to me today who has designed an arduino based DMX controller allowing him set the colour of a LED lamp based on a colour wheel on a screen, rather than just using the standard RGB sliders on a desk.

It's way better than anything I ever did in school but he wanted development ideas and I suggested it would be really useful to be able to set the colour of any of the lights in the rig, rather than plugging the light into the controller directly.

SO! The question is... Is there a way to connect his new controller into the existing lighting desk, allowing him to use his controller on lights already addressed and wired to the roof? In my head it should be easy but I've never seen two desks joined together, let alone with the ability to both make changes to the same light!

I hope this all makes sense and I look forward to hearing from you all soon