Connecting multiple consoles over the DMX-IN does not work for programming

[pietervanemelen]

Since we are starting to use LED lights in our theater show the jester 12/24 becomes very limited in number of channels to use. Since it has been a very reliable and small table were looking how to add more channels.

 

We hook up a usb-dmx dongle to the desk DMX IN and this seems to work great until we started programming.

Once a level of a channel, above the 24 channels we have, is programmed on a value e.g. 55, there is no way to get it down anymore in a next scene... Increasing the value is no problem. This means that next scene you can set it to 100 but not to 0.

The only way to get rid of it is to copy a scene on which this channel is set to 0.

We do not have an issue with the channels assigned to the faders of the desk. It is only a case for the channels that are not assigned to a fader...

 

We had the issue on 3.4 and it is still there on the latest 4.0 release. This is really a hot issue.

Has someone already seen this problem or is there another work around?

 

[KWR88]

Have not seen this issue before when using DMX in to control channels.

can you pm me one address below with some details, the serial number of the desk, the software you are using with the DMX dongle and the type of dongel.

[pietervanemelen]

I do not have the serial number of my jester for the moment. I have to look it up tonight... But the we bought the jester new around September 2007. We use it in combination with 4 rack6 dimpacks.

 

The dongle is a tool I made myself. It is arduino controller connected over the Ethernet to pc. The controller sends a complete 512 channel DMX signal about 40 times a second. I wrote my own software to have control via ipad and android phone of all the channels (easy for testing channels when setting up the system without running every time to your control desk).

 

And the control works fine until we store scene on the desk. When we go to the next scene it will start from the previous one. And there we encounter the problem. With the sliders on the desk we can grab the signal by sliding until we reach the previous value, but with the channels not assigned to the sliders this does not work. The only thing we can do is increase the output of these channels but we don't get it down.

And this is where the copying comes in. Copying a scene with the channels values set to 0 enables us to change the value again to the setting we want.