Adding a fixture

[puchelaar]

Hi,

I've been using lxconsole for a while now in low budget productions, and love the fact that it is possible that someone took the trouble to create this software.

Up till now I've only been using conventional spots, but I have recently bought a couple of (cheap) led fixtures and have trouble adding them correctly. The fixtures are fresnels made by Beamz/BeamzPro, the BTF200CZ. It has RGBW leds, and a motorised zoom from 15º-60º. It can be put in several modes, e.g. 3 channel mode (RGB), 4 channel (DimmerRGB), 5 channel (DimRGBW), etc.

I added it in lx console by right clicking the channel and editing the channels (? I'm doing this by memory from another location, not where the laptop with lx console and the fixtures are, so hope I have all the terminology straight). I managed to have it working in 5 channel mode, so with intensity/R/G/B/W.
For the motorised zoom to work however, I have use 12ch mode, and the manual says this for the channels:
1.dimmer
2.R
3.G
4.B
5.W
6.Colour Macro (?)
7.Strobe
8.Zoom
9.Auto Program (?)
10.Auto Program Speed (?)
11.Dimmer Mode (?)
12.ID Address (?)

I don't quite know or understand what channels 6 and 9 through 12 mean or do, but figure I also don't need them?
But how to add all these channels? Because the terminology seems to differ from the one LX console uses...

Kind regards,
Joris

[admin]

There is not really a standardized list of parameters for automated fixtures. For the purposes of LXConsole, you can just use labels that are close. The Manual for the fixture will tell you what the DMX values for things like Auto-Program do. In most cases, they do nothing at zero. If this is the case, and if you don't intend to use them with LXConsole, you could even leave them out as long as there are not higher addresses you need to use. Otherwise, what you choose to label them probably doesn't matter as long as you know what it does.

For your fixture, I might choose something like the following:
Intensity
Red
Green
Blue
White
Color Macros
Strobe
Spot/Flood
FX
F/X Speed
Dimmer Mode
Control

The only ones that matter are, of course, Intensity, and the colors, which along with RGBW color mix mode will let you use the color picker. And, Spot/Flood which has a dedicated slider (Beam) in the Inspector's Channel tab.

[puchelaar]

Thanks for the speedy reply. I'll check the 'zero does nothing', and will try out naming the functions the way you propose. I'll post the results here.

[puchelaar]

Everything works perfectly! thanks!