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    hacronymus
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External attribute control

We're looking at using MAC IIIs in followspot mode for an upcoming production but we need to find a way to give the spot ops control of hte Iris.  The unreasonable clunky solution would be to do USB extensions to external fader wings at each spot, ideally it would just be a lever or fader that we can mount to the top of the light.  Any thoughts or suggestions?

Right now my thought is to somehow give the operators access to an inhibitive sub for their respective Iris so the console still has control but they can override.

  • If you have an IO gateway you can set the input to 0-10v mode. In turn these inputs can be mapped to events in fader mode which control a sub for each spot.

    If you have analogue faders you'll need your own power supply to get the 10v. Another alternative is to attach a DMX fader to a DMX to analogue converter and then connect that to the gateway.

    Cheers

    Dan

  • What about a Pocket console or similar small DMX fader device that goes into a Net3 gateway with a port set as DMX in. I believe the Net3 gateway will just end up acting as a DMX merge box. Make sure that the console never sends an Iris level above 0 and then the Pocket console will always get priority.

    Never done it, but just thinking out loud. 

  • in reply to travisres

    travisres said:
    Pocket console or similar small DMX fader device that goes into a Net3 gateway

    That would be a possibility, you would need to make sure the sACN priorities matched on the input node and console output however, otherwise the levels of one or the other will always take presidence. You might run into a problem if the backup takes over however, as it will then take higher priority which would take over from the DMX fader.

    Whilst this might be acceptable in your situation, my earlier solution will always work even in backup situations. This is what a number of large scale musicals are doing to control the levels on followspots, whilst giving the followspot operator an inhibit control at the spot.

    Cheers

    Dan

  • We just found ourselves with exactly the same problem using two source 4 followspots, where we wanted our operators to have local inhibits, but for the top level of the dimmer to be set by Eos. We went with Dan's suggestion, using the IO Gateways, and two 0 - 10v analogue faders. It's been working reliably for  5 weeks now.

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