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    Simon35321
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Using touring shows desk to trigger Cobalt 20 to trigger in house LED fixtures

Right here goes.

I work at a venue that receives many touring shows. They all use part or all of our in house lighting rig for colour washes, specials etc. At the moment its quite easy. We give them a lighting plot with dimmer channel numbers on and a feed into our DMX and away they go. 

We are looking at replacing all of our generic lighting fixtures with LED (council owned must be green save money etc etc etc). When we do this whats the best way to go about giving control of our lights to a touring company?

It wouldn't be practical to give them a lighting plot and a list of makes/models for them to download the personalities for their own desk and to patch each fixture. I there a way of linking another desk to ours so that we can set up groups (red wash, blue wash centre spot etc) on the cobalt that correspond to a single address for the touring group to patch and use?

Would any extra kit be required?

Thanks in advance!

  • 0

    I'm doing exactly this, though it requires more than just a Cobalt.
    We have a DMX data distribution called PathPort. It's capable of distributing DMX over network cabling, and can also patch & merge data.
    I have a specific patch set on this system so that anything plugged into a specific DMX in will distribute out to our system ONLY the intensity channel of the fixtures on an HTP basis. The Cobalt can also control the fixtures but is only set as sending colour information.

    A major restriction is that the devices you control MUST have an intensity channel. This required us to use our ETC series 2 S4's on HSI mode instead of RGB as the RGB mode doesn't have an intensity channel. You may find that on some of the fixtures you want to use.

  • 0

    Cobalt has a "DMX In" function that uses one Universe of network DMX to directly control the Intensity of (up to) 512 Desk Channels.
    So simply patch your LED rig in Cobalt, set the colours in Cobalt, and then pretend the Cobalt is a dimmer pack!

    The DMX input appears on Master #20 - so push it to full to get the full levels, pull it down to fade out the visiting console.
    This DMX-In Master behaves the same as any other, so by default levels HTP merge with the rest of the Cobalt system.

    Hardware-wise, you'll need a network and some way of getting their DMX onto the network as E1.31 sACN
    - eg an Ethernet switch, pair of network cables and an ETC Net3 DMX/RDM Gateway.
    (Technically the switch is optional, but it's easier and they cost very little.)

    You may already have those - and many modern consoles can natively output E1.31 sACN as well.
    - It doesn't matter whether the ETC DMX Gateways physically have a male or female XLR connector as you can flip the direction of a DMX Port in the Concert (or GCE) configuration software and use a gender-changer adapter.

    The only gotcha is that your DMX Input needs to be a network DMX universe number that you're not using for anything else.
    Sounds obvious, but I've seen it happen!

  • 0 in reply to Richard
    Thanks both for the responses.

    I should have mentioned at the moment our 2 DMX universes are simply hardwired from the desk position to a number of DMX distribution points where lines on to stage bars/FOH bridge/stage etc run and are terminated at last fixture. Do we need to do anything special to this first or just introduce the Net 3 DMX/RDM gateway and then configure our desk DMX in?
  • 0 in reply to Richard
    Hi Richard,
    Could you maybe take a few snapshots of the setup in Cobalt? Specifically how you've patched the DMX input universe to control an intensity on a device on a different universe?
    This may be an easier solution than what we have done!
  • 0 in reply to Ric

    Hi Ric -

    The DMX Input function on Cobalt/Congo will take in one universe of DMX from an outside source, map it to a universe on the ETC network (thus the suggestion that it be an unused one) and use the incoming DMX levels from the guest console to raise the intensity on a set of 512 control channels within Cobalt/Congo. So, in simplest setup, you enable DMX in, set the input to start controlling channel 1, and whatever comes in from the guest raises and lowers intensity on channels 1-512 of the current Cobalt/Congo patch. So, on the Cobalt/Congo side, patch channels 1-512 to whatever you want (meaning the devices can be connected to whatever universes are needed for the venue), and the guest can raise and lower intensity on those channels.

    Where DMX-In becomes less helpful is controlling the nonintensity parameters of devices on the Cobalt side - the DMX In is not controlling any DMX out directly, it's just raising and lowering control channel intensity. So to allow real pass thru, you would need to patch those 512 channels 1-to-1 with the desired resulting output universe (meaning no device patch on the Cobalt side).

    But for the things you guys want to do, it would be a reasonably simple solution requiring only a single port on an ETC Net3 DMX Gateway to accomplish. The only requirement on the Cobalt side is that all the lights you want them to be able to control on the guest console need to be patched to channels within the 512-channel-range assigned to the DMX Input universe. Set the colors on the Cobalt (with intensity at 0), the guest raises and lowers the intensity on their side.

    Make sense?

    Thanks!

    Sarah

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