Moving Head - Pan Issues

[BobJ]

We run an ETC Element 2 at the theatre where we just hung two (inexpensive but very rugged and bright) "Ridgeyard 36 x 10 w RGBW Moving Heads". Playing with them I noticed that they only responded to positive Pan values. i.e. Anything below 0 (0 > -270) had no effect. In essence they travelled from 0 (Facing forward)

anticlockwise to 150 for a full circle and then on another 3/4 turn to 270.

 

Unfortunately I only have Capture Student at home with no profiles for Ridgeways so I plugged in a Martin MAC Entour and matched it with an entry in a ETC EOS show file. But! I noticed a difference. With the MAC I could run from -270 though 0 and up to 270. This gave me the 1 and 3/4 turns as before. I.E the same as the 0 > 270.

 

With little MH experience I'm not sure if such is normal (-270 -> 270 versus 0 >270) or if I have some setting different between the theatre console and my home EOS suite.

[niclights]

I'm not familiar with the fixtures or the console but it sounds to me like it is just an issue with the way the console is displaying the values. If you get 630 degrees of rotation (ie. 1 3/4 rotations) going from 0 to 270 on the console then that will be the full pan range of the fixture and it is working correctly albeit with a misleading display range (for example 0->255 DMX = display 0->270). Note if the fixture has a 630 degree pan range then -270 -> 270 would also be incorrect anyway. Many moving heads have a selectable pan range of 540 or 630 degrees making it difficult provide accurate values in degrees in the console.

[gyro_gearloose]

So if I understand you correctly, you can pan your fixture one and a half times (540 degrees, which is two times 270) but the software reports the movement range as 0 to 270 degrees?

 

I'm sure you know this, but DMX is only made up of numbers between 0 and 255, or two consecutive channels can be combined to give a range of 0 to 65535. The lighting software knows that your fixture has a movement range of 540 degrees (-270 degrees to 270 degrees) and it will map the degree value to the DMX range. It sounds as though the personality/profile/definition of your fixtures has not been created correctly. It thinks 0 degrees should have a DMX value of 0, but -270 degrees should actually be DMX 0. You'll need to edit the fixture definition so that the Pan range (-270 to 270 degrees) correctly maps to the DMX range.

 

If this seems a bit daunting, send me a copy of your show file and I'll have a look at the fixture definitions for you.

 

Edit: These fixtures?

Edited October 30, 2019 by gyro_gearloose