HELP! LED's with Smartfade

[Kirsten VanWagner]

Hey everyone,

I am a Theatre Director, not a Technical Director, however I find myself newly appointed as the latter. I am working on a production that is going to be in our blackbox theatre. There is ZERO lighting in the room so we're bringing in some LED Par's and color strips. I have 4 of each and 1 Smartfade DMX board (I'm at home right now but I think it is a 1296). I do not have a DMX control box nor do I have dimmers. I've hooked the colorstrips directly to the board before and I can use them as a set of connected leds across the room.

I WANT to be able to control each side (at minimum) separately from each other. So that I can at least have a three different coverage areas.

I've read the manual and I've watched online tutorials but nothing answers my question of IF and HOW this is possible without the DMX box or dimmer packs.

Please help!
KVW
Atlanta, GA

 

[mikeydoesstuff]

Well you certainly don't need dimmers, but you do need power for those Pars and Colorstrips. The smartfade IS dmx control. So you can quite literally "plug (in) and play". Start with getting power to all of those devices.
Then you want to Address them - pop through each devices menu and you should get a number or "add" come up near first. You'll have to read the manuals for your particular pars and strips but set each one that you want individual control of to its own number, and offset those numbers by as many "address" or "channels" as the manuals say they need.

from here, the work is in the console, and if you ever need help go for it and call ETC! They'll happily talk you through!

 

[Scenemaster60]

If you are only operating 8 lights, you would have enough control with just the Smartfade to operate each light independently, actually. Programming the Smartfade to make the LEDs do what you want them to do is not a simple task. I would definitely see if you could commandeer a laptop computer that you could piggy-pack on to the Smartfade. It makes programming on the Smartfade tolerable, especially with LED lights.

 

[chawalang]

I am not terribly familiar with those fixtures but you will need to find the manual online. There should be setting in the fixture for the control mode. This could be 3 channel RGB, 4 channel RGBW, 5 channel SRGB and so on. Once you have that set you just address them accordingly to how many channels they will use. Should be easy to do if you have your console defaulted to a 1 to 1 patch. For your own info never plug anything with solid state electronics into a dimmer for power. The sinewave will destroy it over time, LED fixtures do not need dimmers to dim, they do not use HPL lamps for its light source, it is not a thermal light source. An LED is a semiconductor light source.

 

[GreyWyvern]

Yes. I definitely second what @Scenemaster60 said. The program is called SmartSoft. It's free and can be found here - http://www.etcconnect.com/Products/Consoles/Smart-Family/SmartSoft/Software.aspx. If the computer you would put SmartSoft on is running Windows 8, you will need this information - http://www.etcconnect.com/Support/Articles/SmartSoft-Under-Windows-8.aspx. Just a small hoop to jump through for the drivers to be installed since they aren't Microsoft signed, which you may have already done if you have had to install other un-signed drivers. Just download and install SmartSoft, connect your SmartFade, and you have a pretty decent console with some nice features. One of my favorites is the ability to patch by just dragging and dropping the dimmer onto the channel. It is much easier to adjust fade and wait times. You can label your channels/sequences/steps. You can do everything you need to from the console itself, but SmartSoft makes it much easier.

 

[gafftaper]

While we are glad to help here. ETC has some of the best tech support in the business so if you get stuck trying to figure out something on the Smartfade, don't be afraid to call them 1-800-688-4116

 

[seanandkate]

Find the manuals for your fixtures online. (Here's the link for your Smartfade manual, should you need that as well). LED fixtures can use a lot of DMX channels, but most will allow you to choose how many you would like to use for control. This is where your fixture manuals will be important. Your fixtures might be able to be controlled with as few as 3 or 4 channels of control (red, blue, green amber), even though you could control them with more for more advanced functions that you might not need (strobe, colour macros, etc). You have a minimum of 48 channels of control on the Smartfade, so even if you could control each of the 4 PARS and 4 strips with only a minimum of 6 DMX channels, you can still have complete independent control of 6 parameters of each instrument. If you want two (or more) of the same lights to operate under the same control faders, if you give them the same DMX address, you can control them together.

So say you were going to use one of each instrument (for argument's sake) in each of three areas, left, centre and right, and each of the lights could be controlled with 5 DMX channels (red, blue, green, amber, master intensity). You would address the instruments at DMX 1, DMX 6, DMX 11, DMX 16, DMX 21 and DMX 26. That would use 31 of 48 channels on your Smartfade.

And +1 for ETC support if you need it. They're great.

And lastly, welcome to CB!

 

[Fountain Of Euph]

Welcome Kirsten! A +1 for using smartsoft, it makes the smartade really nice to use.

Quick dmx lesson: dmx is like a large cable with many wires inside(512 to be exact). To control the diffrent functions of lights, called parameters, you need to send a signal to the light over a wire reserved for that light. Some lights only have one one parameter (intensity, or brightness). These lights are called conventionals and only require one wire, or channel of dmx, to them. Traditionally this signal goes to a dimmer that changes the dmx signal to a voltage between 0v and (for me anyway) 120v.

Many lights have more than one parameter. This could be as few as 3 for a RGB led (one for each color) or up to 32+ for some of the moving lights. A long
Light that is a 5 channel fixtures will use 3 wires of the hypothetical dmx cable.
Even though a device may use 5 channels, we call the first channel it is using its address. No light should share any part of its address with any other fixture, unless you want both fixtures to respond the same way.

DMX is a set of rules and procedures that a (called a protocol) that DMX devices use to communicate. In reality DMX cable had 5, 4 or 3 wires in it. DMX is the rules as to how 512 channels of data are transmitted over just a few wires.

A trick I use for assigning dmx:
I take the channel offset ( the number of channels of DMX used to control each device. You can find this in the device manual.) And start addresses on that channel. The start address is the first channel of dmx that the device sends and receives data on. So say I have six 3 channel RGB LEDs, I would addresse the first one to channel 3. The second one would be on 6 (starting channel (3)+ dmx offset(3)=6)
Thus :
Device. Address.
1. 3
2 6
3. 9
4. 12
5. 15
6. 18

And so on. This make addressing so much easier since you only have to think in multiples of three as opposed to having to add. This also makes device id easier because you can take the channel and devide by 3.

Let me know if my explanation is unclear. I use this with students so freedback is appreciated.