Linking ChamSys to QLab

[chrislea_10outof10]

Hi all,

 

I know ChamSys pretty well but QLab I am very new to.

 

I need to link MagicQ (out of demo mode) with QLab so that QLab can trigger LX cues in a playback stack on the ChamSys.

 

From what I read, it can be done via Midi or OSC. Problem is, I can’t find any articles or experiences to setting it up anywhere.

 

Would someone mind giving me a rough idea on how to do it?

 

QLab 4 will be on a Mac, MagicQ on a windows laptop running Windows 10.

 

Thanks so much in advance.

 

C.

[gyro_gearloose]

I can't comment specifically on QLab or MagicQ, but let me share some of the things I've learned when setting up OSC with our ETC Element and my iPad.

 

I sometimes use a remote control on my iPad to control our lighting desk. The iPad uses TouchOSC to send and receive OSC messages to and from the Element via a wifi router which is used only for that purpose.

 

To get both devices talking to each other I need to manually tell them both what the network address is of the other device, as OSC appears to have no way of automatically discovering devices on the network. To make life a bit easier, I have set up the router to give the lighting desk and my iPad their own static network address.

 

A quick word on network addresses. It seems to be a good idea to use the 10.x.y.z range of addresses for show control situations rather than 2.x.y.z. Artnet uses 2.x.y.z for its address range and other manufacturers seem to have followed suit, but this can cause problems with modern devices which understand the internet. For instance, when first setting up TouchOSC with our Element I used the 2.x.y.z address range because I was also using Artnet for another project. With this setup, I couldn't get my iPad to talk to the Element. It was only after switching over to the 10.x.y.z address range that everything worked as it should, so keep this in mind when setting up your network.

 

Alongside the network address of each device, you also need to tell the devices which ports to use to send and receive messages through. Usually its 9000 and 8000, so you would set the transmit port on one device and the receive port on the other to 9000, and vice versa.

 

Once that is done you should be able to send OSC messages between MagicQ and OSC. Like I said, I have no specific experience of using OSC on QLab and MagicQ, but once all the hard work of setting the network up is complete, actual OSC messages are quite straight forward. For example, to trigger 'Go' on playback 1 the OSC message in QLab would be '/pb/1/go'.

 

Hope this helps.

[diecastbox]

Had a lot of fun getting Qlab to control Chamsys over OSC, everything set up as per all the instructions. So same network etc etc nothing worked until we set the receive port on Chamsys to the default send port on Qlab ie 53001 then magically everything worked. (it seems Qlab was ignoring our request to transmit on different port numbers).