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Mac 250 with fat frog


knightdan65

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Hi,

 

Trying out a pair of Mac 250 kryptons with a fat frog. Shutter values on the control wheel in the beamshape settings appear to have no effect until I reach 208, at which point they go into some sort of demo mode and start spinning g around and doing all sorts of nonsense. I’ve got the DMX protocol here, but confused as to why the beamshape function on the desk has no bearing on the protocol? The macs work as expected with ETC Nomad so I’m fairly sure the desk is the problem here - have I missed something?

 

Dan

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It does, although the shutter control is on channel 1 in both modes. 208-217 in the shutter control is reset but should only activate if certain conditions are met (dependent on fixture settings). You should be able to find open shutter at 20-49 (as well as a number of other ranges) and linear strobe 50-72 (fast->slow) on channel 1.
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The Mac has either 8bit or 16bit (they’re currently set to 8bit). The fat frog describes them as ‘mode 4’. The the only option

 

Yes, the values you mention correlate to the DMX written in the manual, however they don’t respond to these values when selected on the desk

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The Martin MAC 250 Krypton (and Entour) don't have any 8bit modes. They have two 16bit modes - 16 bit and 16 bit Extended ('16BT' and '16EX' in the fixture PSET menu) with 14 and 17 channel footprints respectively. The original MAC 250 and 250+ has four modes denoted as 'DMX1', 'DMX2', 'DMX3' and 'DMX4' in the fixture PSET menu with 9, 11, 11 and 13 channel footprints respectively. The shutter control channel and function ranges are the same for all modes of all MAC 250 models but if the wrong personality/mode is used you could end up with strange output as a result of the different channel count footprints. As far as I can see the latest Zero 88 library has personalities for all modes of all models available. Perhaps your library is out-of-date and you need to update?
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Also worth noting, if you are in a venue (say amdram or "village" hall) with a "constant" set of fixtures, it's worth using the Fixture Tools that Edward points to above to set up the 20 "Common Fixture Types" and load these into the Fat Frog for easy setup. Of course if you need a new fixture not already pre-loaded into the desk, then load in from floppy - it's just you'd then need to do this after each time you've reset the desk for the next show (presuming you do a desk reset between shows!).

 

Kevin

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I think I mentioned last week when you said you had a Fat Frog lurking around somewhere, the next thing you'll probably be looking into is how to replace the battery...

http://www.blue-room...showtopic=57067

 

If I may be so cheeky to point to my own post in that thread, before you start unscrewing right-left-and-centre and pulling knobs and faders off, it's a very minimal job to get at the battery. Please see my entry here:

 

https://www.blue-room.org.uk/index.php?showtopic=57067&view=findpost&p=514501

 

Kevin

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When in doubt set the address on the unit to one and then use the faders on the desk to see what each channel does. This will show up if you have the correct fixture installed on the desk. I have a 16 channel desk for this very reason. It has shown up errors on cheaper led kit with Chinese origin and somehow they missed a channel off completely!
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The key thing to understand here is that the desk and fixtures have no idea of each other's existence in the system. The whole thing only appears to work correctly for the user when the library file, fixture mode and address are all correct and in accord. This is a fundamental of DMX systems and not something people think to tell you early on when trying to work out why things aren't happening. The system is a lot dumber than what we are used to in a modern network.

 

Any one of the above things that isn't correct, even with a perfectly working DMX signal and system, the whole user experience falls over.

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