Elation Design LED (DLED) 12 Brick template and usage

Question

I am trying to setup and use a DLED 12 LED fixture (this has 4 of each LED color: red, green, and blue) on our Congo jr console. It works fine in 6ch mode (using 6ch template) with all the red LEDs together, green LEDs together, and blue LEDs together using the color dials to adjust them, and 3 other channels (macros, strobe, intensity) using the beam dials. I would like to actually have each LED be available to set independently for a color change across the fixture (like a rainbow - sort of). I have tried both the 12 and 15ch templates, but when I set those up I can only control one set of LEDs (one red, green, blue) - the other 9 LEDs do not light up. The color dials show red, green, and blue but when looking at the live attributes you can see that only one of each is affected. I made a simple 3ch template and imported it as 4 different fixtures on 4 channels, but I would prefer to have a template that would have several pages of color with something like red1, red2, red3, red4, green1, green2, green3, green4, blue1, blue2, blue3, blue4, but I don't see any way to create custom device parameters like this. Am I missing something? 
 Also along similar lines, last year someone mentioned that they were working on a way to be able to use these types of RGB LED fixtures as CMY, using the built in color selector to be able to set colors. Has anything been done with this? 
 Thanks - Sean, Technical Director, SF Bay Area, California

sclausen · Accepted Answer

1) You can add new parameters by inserting them in the Parameter Definitions list - Browser>Patching>Settings and Tools. 
 2) I would treat multi-cell LED fixtures as a number of individual channels, not as a single fixture, if it's effects you're after. To make it easier to handle the fixture as a whole, I would make a group. That way you can select the group and set one RED parameter, instead of always having to adjust 6 or more parameters. Also, multi-channel setups allow you to run all kinds of effects across the fixture cells. As a single channel, you will have a very hard time doing this. 
 3) If you define the fixture with CMY and invert each of those parameters, you should be able to use the color picker. Have you tried the gel picker, though? That should work directly with RGB. Which software version are you running? 
 I hope this helps - 
 
 Thanks! 
 
 Sarah

Richard · Answer

The gel picker in 5.1.0 works straight into RGB fixtures, but it will *not* work with Red1, Green1, Blue1 etc parameters. 
 (The 5.0.1 gel picker only worked for CMY fixtures) 
 I would strongly recommend patching multi-cell fixtures as channel-per-cell. 
 It is so much easier to control like this, as you've instantly got global colour palettes, the effects engine and other helpful tools, plus it's much easier to pick each individual cell when building special sequences. 
 For this fixture, it looks like the best method would probably be the 12-channel mode, patched as 4 consecutive "Generic": "RGB" channels. 
 You may wish to build an extra template to contain the three attributes of 'global' fixture functions available in the 15-channel mode, but in my opinion the only useful bit there is the strobe. 
 This is very similar to the way you would control media servers.

sclausen · Answer

Yes, each channel should be patched as a generic RGB fixture, and each of those channels would occupy three DMX addresses. So, if you have a 4-cell fixtures addressed at 1, and hopefully the fixture mapping works the right way, your patch should look like: 
 chan 1 RGB DMX 1-3 where DMX1=Red, DMX2=Green, DMX3=Blue 
 chan 2 RGB DMX 4-6 
 chan 3 RGB DMX 7-9 
 chan 4 RGB DMX 10-12 
 Make sense? 
 Thanks - 
 Sarah