16bit dimmer?

[stanelie]

Hello.
It's unclear to me how to patch a 2 channel dimmer working over 16 bit.
Could anyone give me a step by step example?
Thanks!

[admin]

Select the channel you want to patch, either on the command line of by clicking it in the main display.

Choose Channel->Setup Hilited Channels...

Assuming that the channel already has one part that is of the dimmer type,

Select that part/row in the parts table.

Click Edit.

In the subchannels table the should be one row for intensity. The far left column is for the resolution of the subchannel. Change it from 1 byte to 2 bytes.

Click Done, then Click OK.

[stanelie]

I think I am missing something :
After setting this up according to your previous post, if I select channel 1 (the MSB channel, the other one is dimmed out in the main view), and then go to the channel pane in the inspector, and I select "fine", when I move the slider, it changes the value of the channel 1.

Is this expected behavior? What am I missing?

[admin]

What version of LXConsole are you asking about? There should not be a fine channel for a 16 bit dimmer. There is only one channel that outputs 16 bit resolution (2 bytes/ DMX slots).

[admin]

Actually, I think you are asking about the trackpad control. Hovering the cursor over this area and scrolling with either a mouse wheel or trackpad changes the subchannel selected in the table to the far left. Coarse/Fine determine the scrolling speed when doing this. Using the control changes the selected subchannel level by percent in either a fraction of 1% or larger increments as you scroll. It has nothing to do with a fine subchannel or LSB.

[stanelie]

Using the trackpad area of the channel inspector, while the MSB channel is selected in the main view, scrolling the mouse wheel only changes the MSB channel. I would have expected it to run through all the values possible with 16bit resolution, and using the LSB channel to do so...

How can I have a fader/wheel/controller change the intensity of my 16bit dimmer, and going over all the possible values? Is this possible?

I don't get how I am supposed to use/reach values that use the LSB. If I save a cue with this dimmer at 0%, and another cue at 10%, and do a crossfade, I only see the MSB values change...

[stanelie]

Maybe I just don't see the values change in the main window, the LED device seems to do a pretty smooth fade, it has to be using the 16bit resolution...

[admin]

You won't see 16bit values displayed. You can change the main display to show hex or 0-255 values. But, that won't show you the fine resolution. You'd need to examine the DMX data itself to see that. LXConsole stores all of its levels as 64bit floating point percentages until the final conversion to bytes for DMX.

There is no such thing as a separate fine channel in LXConsole anymore. Instead, LXConsole correctly converts its floating point percent for output into two bytes when there is 16 bit resolution set for a subchannel. This is much smoother and more accurate than the older scheme where there was a separate "fine" subchannel and you could see the LSB values.

[stanelie]

Thanks a lot for the infos and clarifications.

Stan