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

Question

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!

Ric · Answer

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.

Richard · Answer

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!