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    dstephens22
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LED Tape Personality

We have recently purchased RGB LED tape to go behind the cross and inside the drum cage at our church.  With the kit we ordered, we received a 3 channel DMX decoder.  I was able to patch the lights into our Smartfade ML board, but the color palettes are all out of whack because there is no actual personality for the tape.  Does anyone have any thoughts and/or suggestions??  I tried creating a new personality from scratch using the tutorial for the board, but didnt have any luck. 

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  • in reply to Richard

    All LED's are not created equal, so color matching with other LED fixtures might not be the same.  LED tape is usually very different in color temp than LED fixtures due to the small led diodes used.

  • in reply to jpgagnon

    Well I am not as concerned about the colors matching, as much as just getting the board to recognize them.  The board shows the color palette as it is for the rest of the fixtures, however, red displays yellow, blue displays red, magenta displays blue, etc.  It is like the palette is scrambled.  I thought maybe the tape was either GRB or BGR or BRG, but any combination we tried gave us an incorrect display.  That is what lead me to believe maybe it was a device personality issue.

  • in reply to dstephens22

    It sounds like your connections may be cross-wired, which is easy to do with LED tape drivers. The pinout for the SMD 5050 is something like BRG or BGR.

  • in reply to dstephens22

    First step is to try the tape using the normal dimmer faders, and see what order the colours run and if there are any other features you didn't expect.

    Eg set the tape to DMX Start Address 1, set the console to default 1:1 dimmer patch and find out what happens when you raise faders A1-5 (DMX 1-5)
    - I always try a few DMX addresses above the expected ones in case there are some surprising features there!

    The Generic > LED RGB personality is indeed 1=Red, 2=Green, 3=Blue.

    If the order is different to that, note down what you actually get for each fader and it'll either match one of the Generic > LED templates, or you'll need to create your own.

    Remember that you do need to select the overall colour mix system when creating your own personality template, choosing from None, RGB, RAGB or CMY.

    - Yellow isn't a diode colour in an RGB tape, so Red giving you Yellow implies you had the template's colour mix system set to CMY rather than RGB.

  • in reply to sk8rs_dad

    I've seen some really cheap stuff where the tape itself is labelled wrong for +12,R,G,B and the only way to suss it out is to manually check each piece, it was very annoying.

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