I work in a couple schools with
Lehigh systems, though mainly from 1995 and up where they used a different
connector for the houselights - it's very similar to a
VGA monitor plug on all of ours. In these systems the
houselight dimmers are in the rack but are controlled by a separate analog
system. While you can figure out which dimmers control the houselights, the
processor is programmed to PREVENT
dmx control of the houselights. The
houselight dimmers are usually in the bottom row of dimmers in the rack, but not always the last few dimmers as they often shared neutrals and as a result they spread the load over all three phases. We have one school where in an 68
dimmer system they (
Lehigh) decided that
dimmer 32 should be a
houselight along with 6 more at the bottom of the rack. For years we thought there was no
dimmer 32 or 61. We recently found a local company that has dug into these (and other 'old') systems and their tech told us that there we had a
dimmer 32 and
dimmer 61, but that they were hiding. On a PM visit he pointed out that the last two dimmers in the rack had no circuits connected to them and put temporary
tails on them. We ran through all the dimmers and the second to the last
dimmer in the rack was 32 and the last one was 61.
We asked the tech about getting
DMX control of the houselights and he said the only way was to reprogram the
Eprom and that the last time he talked to
Lehigh they told them their
Eprom machine had broken and was so old that it couldn't be fixed and that there was no longer a way to reprogram them. The tech's company sees a lot of old systems and they took a decommissioned
Lehigh system apart and have developed a retrofit solution for the
Lehigh processors using a Johnson Systems CD-2000. The company expects to start installing them in the next few months.
For your show I suggest you do what we do - keep the old
console out so that you can run the houselights from it. The tech told us that the
houselight module in our
Lehigh consoles are a stand alone
unit and that it is possible to remove the module from the
console and wall or
desk mount it. We'll be having them do that so we can run a show with just one
console in the booth instead of the
ETC console for the
stage lighting and the
Lehigh brick just for the houselights.