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    Jeff Perry
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Trying to understand Universes

Looking for help understanding setting up Universes.

Ok I'm a volunteer at our PAC which is a new high school(fall 2018) with 860 seating. We have 15 Pars above stage, CYC lights, 6 Mythos plus a number of Lekos on all 3 electrics & FOH. I understand how to patch into the different universes for each fixture. Plus we are currently patched into using 2 universes. But I am trying to understand what I think is the hardware side. our 1st & 2nd Electrics & the FOH(Catwalk) are on the 1st universe. The 3rd Electric & the 2 Mythos on the Catwalk((Data fed is via a wireless setup to the CAT) are on the 2nd Universe. Is each universe set up at the DMX Control unit & either hardwired in to the Electrics or Wireless sent? How would I go about adding a 3rd universe if we wish to do this so we can have more options with the total number of addresses we can use? Looking to educate myself on this topic so any help is awesome. 

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  • just another attempt at explaning. sometimes it helps if multiple people try explaining the same thing in different ways.

    in the "old" days (5pin XLR aka "DMX" connectors) you had one DMX cable. it could transport 512 pieces of information. at some point a 2nd and 3rd and maybe even a 4th cable were added. later, instead of adding more individual cables the idea was to just run one Ethernet (= "network") cable and feed the various data streams that used to run in seperate cables into the same network cable. and now suddenly we needed to be able to distinguish between the pieces of information that used to run in the first cable and those that ran in the second cable. because data now suddenly could "mix", it wasn't isolated by cable insulation from each other anymore.
    that's where the universes come in. a universe hold 512 addresses, aka exactly what we used to be able to run in a dedicated DMX cable. so think of Universe 1 as a virtual DMX cable.

    so nowadays (especially in a newer install like yours) you would have aconsole that generates lots of information and feeds those into the network. looking at it from the receiver side, the fixtures usually don't have network ports (but that's becoming more common), they are expecting old fashioned DMX. so now we need a way to get the DMX out of the network. that's where Gateways (sometimes called nodes) come into play. they get fed the information from the network, then sort the information by universe number and finally output this to a DMX socket.
    which universe they're outputting to which of their DMX sockets is configurable.

    the DMX communication is one way (this is a simplification, there are feedback capabilities, but let's keep it simple for now). the console feeds all the information it has into the network and then you have the gateways that listen for data that's marked with the universe number it's supposed to be listening for.
    if a gateway has multiple outputs it can listen to a different universe for each output, or it can output the same universe to multiple of its outputs. and also multiple gateways can be listening to the same universe if they want to.

  • in reply to ueliriegg

    This is great info. I'm understanding a good chuck of it already & I'm sure the rest will make since in time. 

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