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    Willhay23
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Custom fixture patch

Hi all! I've recently come into possession of two new moving head lights. They're very cheap and so the brand doesn't really exist anywhere online. I'm trying to patch them on my ETC software so I can run them using my Nomad, but naturally they don't exist anywhere in ETC's fixture library, so I've had to create a custom fixture. However, I can't work out how to create the fixture properly. The manual lists the DMX channels (on 9 channel mode) as:

1 - Pan, 2 - Tilt, 3 - Colour (it's a colour wheel), 4 - Gobo, 5 - Dimming, 6 - Linging (?), 7 - Pan/Tilt speed, 8 - Model, 9 - Dim Modes

I've managed to guess what the right things are enough to get the lights working a bit, but I'm 100% sure I haven't done it right. As a student who still doesn't know tonnes about advanced programming, is there anyone out there who can help explain how I can patch this properly? 

I've included photos of the manual, and a screenshot of what I've managed to come up with so far on ETC. Thanks in advance for any help!

  • 0

    two things:

    i would suggest using the 11ch mode. the only difference is Pan and Tilt using 16bit (2 admx addresses each) but that makes a huge difference. so click in the row for pan, column DMX. choose 16 in the dropdown and then you want addresses 1 and 2. same for tilt but with 3 and 4. then renumber the rest.

    the other thing: usually in Eos we use Pan and Tilt in real life degrees. a lot of movers have 540° of Pan, maybe you can find some information for your light in the manual. the range for the pan parameter would then be:
    Min=0
    Max=65535 (or 255 if you stick with the 9ch mode)
    UserMin= -270
    UserMax=270

    so the home value of pan is still 0. but not 0 DMX but rather 0 degrees.

  • 0 in reply to ueliriegg

    Probably a good idea to Home Pan & Tilt at 32.768. 50% is a better choice than 0%.

    I bought a similar unit to OP's and the big problem I had was in having to convert from 0%-100% to 256 steps for my indexing. I found indexing worked best on these cheap Chinese lights when I left some room for deviation. If Colour 1 was 000-007, I'd make it 002-005 in the profile.

  • 0 in reply to Wuz314159

    Thanks both for your replies ... I'll give them a go. How do I go about setting the Min and Max values on the pan parameter? And also, how do I go about programming the indexing? As in, so I don't have to keep scrolling through the colour wheel as if its a dimmer channel until I find the colour I want? Sorry for being so dumb - I'm a newbie haha! Thanks for your help

  • 0 in reply to Willhay23

    the answer to the pan/tilt question: have a look at the right-most column of your screenshot. the Range column currently has 0 > 100. click there, it will open a popup.

    for Pan and Tilt you want to enter min/max/userMin/userMax values.

    for the color wheel: in patch (not in the fixture editor) select your channels of that moving light type. click {Attributes}. on the right hand side of the CIA is a field ColorSelect. click it. this opens the color wheel editor. you can create a new wheel by clicking New and then edit it. you need to insert the color chips you have in your color wheel. i guess you will not know the dichro manufacturer so you can stick with gel numbers. it's all in the color library that will pop up as soon as you click the grey square next to the word New. as soon as you're done click {Done}.

    the console now knows how many (and which) colors are in your mover's color wheel and should snap from color to color when you turn the encoder.

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