Simple LED PAR controller for a self-op band

[Alec]

OK, so having seen some of the Thomann £30 cheapie PAR 56s recently, I'm now happy that a handful of these could be just the job for small pub gigs with my band. I'm happy with the lights themselves, their brightness & all. My issue now is what simple controller I can use with them. I know I could just leave them on sound-triggered chase, or on a slow chase, but that sounds completely naff.

 

I'd far rather have a simple foot controller that would allow possibly as little as pressing a button to go to the next colour, or to start/stop a sequence. And perhaps another to blackout or similar.

 

Stairville Footmaster I - can't work out if this is a DMX controller, or just a fancy footswitch. Fantastically simple, but will it actually do anything with the LED PARs?

 

Stairville Colormaster control set - adds a controller to a simple foot switch, but looks less "foot friendly", as I won't have hands spare to mess around while playing.

 

Botex FC405 P - looks far more comprehensive.

 

Does anyone have experience in this kind of area?

[benweblight]

There is a purpose made unit for LED PARs made by Ryger, though abit pricey and probably does more than you need (good for future expansion though).

 

http://www.rygershop.co.uk/shop/article_12...3%26aid%3D12%26

[Alec]

Cor, that Ryger controller is £350, though! A bit steep for a cheap & cheerful 4-6 can solution costing under £200!

 

Thanks for the pointer, though. Any other takers?

[dvidos]

Hi Alec,

 

Your first controller seems nothing more than two switches in a housing. The second one seems dedicated to control the HL40 fixtures.

 

The third one seems promising. I found a user manual here. It seems oriented towards generic (incandescent) PAR cans, but maybe you can ignore channel one and use channels 2-4, as these are used by the LED PAR cans you have.

 

edit: Thinking about it, the LED PARs may not work, waiting to collect the fifth channel byte, since the controller only sends four channels of DMX.

 

Also, see another thread here. Is MIDI totally ruled out?

 

Dimitris

[KidRay]

Here's a cheaper version of that foot controller:

http://www.thomann.de/gb/showtec_lightfoot...ncontroller.htm

It looks like it's designed to control a DMX dimmer pack though, only 4 DMX channel output, and with just 4 led parcans you will have in the region of 20 (more or less dependant on the fixture) possible DMX channels to address.

 

I have a similar problem; unfortunately I bought the wrong controller.

 

http://www.thomann.de/gb/stairville_dmxmaster_i.htm

 

What I should have done is get a version of that controller which is midi compatible (IIRC the Chauvet DMX-50 is one such), and a basic midi foot controller, then I could have programmed all the scenes/chases and used the foot controller to step through scenes etc.

 

Ho Hum