Ed75

Hello Edward. Is the story the same for FLX S?? I'm considering to use artnet too.

Not yet. Have been doing some testing, nothing funny till now. And I had an upcoming theatre job for a month......start date would have been last monday, sunday evening everything cancelled...... Yesterday evening the rest of the usual theatre work cancelled for at least another three weeks. All pandemic panic. So no 'live' testing coming weeks........ Which leaves me enough time to test now, but not 'live' . I do not posess any multi-cell fixtures, so can't comment on that. Yesterday I had my last job for the coming weeks.....took the FLX S48, had to set it up in half an hour, and it worked fine. Simple job though. only 48 dimmers.

did you try to make a copy of it, on another usb stick? (in a PC or laptop) and try this new stick in your desk? I would use an empty stick, freshly formatted FAT32 . and copy everyting to it. Do not create folders.

Okay. Change of plans. . Got myself a second streamdeck (ow yeah black friday) and got my hands on a small 360deg. foldable touchscreen windows laptop. (11,4", on the left) The idea was to get rid of use of the keyboard for 99% of the time. If I still needed it only for the numbers felt a bit stupid. The right screen is a multitouch 13" directly into the desk. (had it already in use) In the 19" rack underneath there is a keyboard drawer with usb keyboard and usb trackball. (out of jail ticket) And a wireless hub. (all already in use too) Till now I used the space where the laptop is for an Ipad. Laptop of course plugged into the hub. (no use of wifi during a show) The reason I have chosen 2 small streamdecks is: I already had one, and the XL is too big to fit nicely.

Had to sort out first some image related things. Hope it works. The whole setup is in progress......... nearly there. Note: the keys are backlighted. The way I created the buttons :

Started fiddling with an Elgato Stream deck. A nice 15-illuminated-button pageable box. It IS possible to use it with FLX S, You need to connect a PC/laptop running windows 10 and Zeros monitor. Connect the Streamdeck to your PC/laptop, and configure some keys. I chose to configure the "missing" handy keys on a FLX S . e.g. arrows, home, highlite, a fast @ , a thru , and so on. Choose yourself. It is only possible to use the standard keyboard shortcuts. Half of them are on the desk itself anyway, the other half I chose to put on the streamdeck now. Saves learning them by heart, saves using the Z-key, saves use of shift and ctrl buttons and/or putting stickers on your keyboard keys. Nice experiment, and it works fine. Only the fact you need a PC/laptop running next to your FLX S is a bit of overkill. And for the about 15 buttons you are probably going to use, a bit of an investment. I own the thing anyway, mainly for use with Qlab. For fullsize FLX it should be possible to make a MIDi-controller out of it. via the "Companion"-program which works together with the Elgato software. Though I think it needs some more type of whizzkid than I am. As far as I know, companion already has some ready 'personalities' for some existing other brand lighting desks.

Yes, I got it. just tried a little bit. So the conclusion is indeed the max or the min fader value, (rec at 0 default is max. rec at 100 default is min. ) , depends on the fixture's default values in the desk. As my question was . I put them in 0 pan/tilt as default and it works. The palette idea is nice. Thanks a lot again! !

Sorry to 'misuse' yor topic for this, but I was playing with the same subject a few days ago. Managed to get every fixture parameter under a fader, just for the fun of trying it, and see how it worked, and learning it. I also managed to put pan and tilt under two faders, BUT....it seemed the '0' to '100' range referred tot the 'home' position as '0' . Which is in my case 50% of the real pan and tilt. *) Which left me with half of the full range on a fader. Is this normal behaviour? Or do I miss something here? (again 🤓 ) Recording with the values at zero resulted in the first half of the movement on a fader, (0-50%) recording at 100% resulted in the second half. (50-100%) It's not important , I am not going to use it this way for pan and tilt, but it leaves me a bit curious now. *) : could it be the default values of the fixture itself too, causing this?

Sorry, I do not totally agree with you. With an external keyboard attached you have a fair bit of syntax on FLX S. I can select fixtures by typing numbers and press enter. Also with use of 'thru' . I customized a keyboard for this, showing all shortcuts on the keys according to the FLX S48 manual : https://www.zero88.com/manuals/zeros/shortcuts/keyboard-shortcuts with an external monitor attached (FLX S48) you have the blue syntax line on the bottom of your cue list window.

Hi Edward, indeed these fixtures have this possibility. Lamp on/off via dmx in the fixturemenu. I didn't realize this had an effect on the personality. (it stays 27 channels) Thanks for your answer!!

Having installed first 7.9.9. and now 7.10 (including their respective libraries) I accidentally patched to 27-chan "lamp off" mode. Therefore the "lamp" channel (#23) had a "no function" title on the encoder wheel and didn't work at all. No lamp macro's were automatically created either . Now I patched the 27 ch "lamp on" mode and everything seems to work fine. (no fixture connected yet, playing around at home) What is the sense of the 27-ch "lamp off" mode in the fixture library? Can't think of any reason why it should be there? By the way, in the former library, (last one before 2.1) the Clay Paky Alpha HPE 300 file had some issues autocreating palettes and didn't have any macro's in it. (FLXS48 and 7.9.7. ) I had to make myself some lamp on / lamp off beam palettes for this. For me this problem is over now, after the updates.

Just about sending you a PM Edward, about this, and discovered this topic. Here too.

I would suggest you patch the dimmers on a 'logical' fixture number. for example dmx 2.1 to dmx 2.36 to fixture 101 to 136 .......or someway else that is logical to you. That would be the way I would do it I guess. The 'page' button idea is nice.

Nice idea! What is your own use mainly? concerts or theatre? My use is mainly theatre, with use of dimmers, moving heads and LED fixtures. I use it at FOH with 13" touchscreen , external keyboard and trackball. (the last are easy for me, for fast scrolling through my cuelist , and naming cues/ editing times) FLXS48 2 Universe. I'm always using the main playback (0) and of course the large GO button, for my main cuelist. If live timed effects or live timed other items are needed , I use the other playbacks to add these.

Sure you didn't place any odd potentially disturbing items next to your dmx cables, desk connectors , or the fixtures? I remember having some similar trouble a few years ago. We were using model trains in our scenery. Very nice gimmick, controlled them with dmx too. Nice little project. moving heads followspotting the trains and so on. 😎 But in the build-trial-and-error period, I had dmx hiccups, and it appeared to be one of the trains passing a spot where one of the dmx connectors to my fixtures was placed too close to the rails....... In this case it were also a few fixtures acting funny, the dimmers and some other fixtures acted normal. Sometimes it can be simple....

Have you tried exchanging your dmx-cable for another one? (from desk to fixtures) if you use a dmx splitter, , try to disconnect it and not use it. Use 1 cable directly from your desk to your first fixture. try connecting one fixture first. If you get this to work, the problem will probably be solved. After this, connect fixture by fixture, and see if your system still keeps working. if not there is a problem in one of the other fixtures. (settings or something)

To start simple: check >Setup >Universes and see if dmx output is on (The 'enabled' button should be blue ) Try another clean usb-stick. Should be formatted FAT32 without booting capability. And try to repeat installing your fixture library. It should load the way you do it. (Load button)

+ 1 . Also missing this possibility

Thank you Edward, I read that, but my knowledge and understanding of version numbers at that moment made me think I needed a bootable stick. Which I probably didn't need. But I discovered that way FLXS didn't boot a bootable stick .

I just did the same on my FLXS48 last week . Discovered the fact FLXS doesn't load from bootable sticks. I wasn't aware of that, though I read the manual(s) carefully. Costed me about an hour and the use of three USB sticks though. I decided to go the safe way. Downloaded both 7.9.8 and 7.9.9 . To go from 7.9.7 to 7.9.9. First updated to 7.9.8 and then to 7.9.9. No problems. This took only ten minutes more from my time, but it worked fine.

Thank you both for your answers, crystal now. It just seemed a bit strange to me that fader control excludes the "GO' button. Didn't remember that from reading the manual. And indeed it is not mentioned I think. (just read it back) Thank you for the invitation to your Beta test group. I'll send one of you a PM about that. Cheers ,Ed By the way, just plugged in a 13" touchscreen monitor, works like a dream.

Hello All, As mentioned before I'm diving into Zeros a little bit more now, watching tutorials , and fiddling around on my FLXS . Sometimes I'm also checking the most basic things, though I don't normally use all of them, I've got time now to fiddle around. I always use the Master playback for my main cue list. (Theatre guy you know) . And I use it as configured by default. E.g. the fader is HTP master and the button GO (fade). tonight I changed the fader function to Manual Fade (2 ways) , and went through a few cues by fader. With the result the 'GO' button is out of function? I think this is a bit strange. The 'GO' button is not responding , even after I changed the settings again. (the fader settings back to HTP Master , and even the GO settings to snap and fade) No result. It requires a restart of the desk to make the 'GO' work again. Anyone ideas about this?

Fully agree with you. It's the way to go, and stay cool 😉 Last show I did, (played 22 times) at a point contained 6 cues "snapping" in 0 secs, and the timing between them depended on the actors on stage. The following que after the 6th was a "snap" Blackout...... So you can imagine that nothing need to go wrong there. Every 22 shows spot-on 🤓 (of course I could have put an autofollow-with-wait time pointcue in between "6" and "7" showing the lighting state of "6" and giving me some safety, but hey, keeps a man awake 😋

Hi all, New to this forum, and relatively new to Zero88 (Zeros) I am an experienced theatre technician/lighting designer from the Netherlands. 2 months before the Covid19 misery I bought a FLXS 48 2U . used it for a month, and everything was over due to Covid. Now up and running again, designed and ran a 4-week outdoor show last month, and everything went basically ok. I had to figure out some things (again) , and now I take my time to dive deeper into Zeros. For me it works the best hand-on or with a show fresh in mind. Nice to discover I did find out (and used) some of the more complicated stuff myself already, before watching a Youtube tutorial. 🙃 I updated to 7.9.9 now and fixture library 2.1 I've voted in your poll, because I'm "fresh" into Zeros, and there are a few simple things I start to miss here, (or immediately miss) compared to some other consoles/ software I'm used to. Don't get me wrong, I find the Zeros system, and the FLXS an pleasure to work on, though I miss some simple functional things sometimes. Things like Park, Midi/OSc functionality, extended color mixing, (including the possibility to mix RGB and CMY seperately) and a few more. Good you published the poll, it is nice to see other people agreeing Happy programming! 😉 Looking forward to some of the most popular (simple) changes. Cheers, Ed