more help with gobo rotators

wow i dont have to deal with the whole moving lights/personality thing?
thats cool

and this is where i show my ignorance. im still a little confused. okay. so each effect on the rotators has a number, starting at 701, and you turn the dial to those numbers and thats what it does. how do i patch channels to those?
 
Pie4weebl, really? I've never heard of them. I was under the impression that the chopped sin wave from a dimmer would destroy the motor. Do you know off the top of your head what models are dim-able?

I wish I could tell you but I don't remember what model they were, the older ones with had at my high school were dimable though to control speed, but the new twinspin's we got are not.
 
its true, they are apollo smart move dmx... and ive read that manual multiple times, very helpful, but doesnt tell me how to patch. i dont expect it to. if i remember correctly it says refer to your console manual on how to patch. so i did that and got all confused about the moving lights business.

and to make matters worse, we tried to call the guy who set up our auditorium (essentially, the only man who'd be able to tell us what to do) and couldnt get a hold of him.. left a message but hasnt called back yet. and im upset. but im doing better, lol, i have a grip on things now.

just a reminder, its an ETC Express board..
 
I don't have the Express manual on me (we got one at our school) but it should be fairy simple to just patch in some channels. Just look under patching but you seemed to have moved away in the intels section.

Hey - don't feel bad. It's just an effect (and you're quite lucky to have rotators hehe) I once wanted an effect of movement and patterns and I resulted in having backstage deck crew members waving their fingers randomly infront of fixtures on the side booms I had setup. I ended up cutting the effect, bc it didn't fit as I would have liked but it did actually look neat with the shadows on people. I would go nuts having rotators... hehe.

But seriously, you'll figure it out. Call your local lighting supply show (ie: Barbizon or something [thats what we got here]) and ask them for help. They're often nice and can give advice (free!) over the phone about general things on boards (and express is so well known that you shouldn't have a problem).
 
This really shouldn't warrant all the stress, raeraeiam.

If this down to the wire and dmxing it isn't working, just do this:
(I'm getting this from the manual and haven't used the fixture, so someone with experience please step in)

You'll notice that the rotators should come with a 120v adapter. Plug one end into any power outlet and the other into the rotator. You can control rotation speed on the adapter.
Then you don't have to worry about it. Just run the fixture on a dimmer as you would any other light. The rotator will just run on its own and not go through the light board at all. Granted, you loose control over various effects on the device, but I'd just work on that when I had more time to figure it out.

Does this make sense? You're essentially setting the rotator to automatic.
 
so today we got a hold of the ETC tech support and got it all worked out.
i felt bad, because it took forever (since i dont know hardly anything i had to ask a million questions- but hey, thats what they're there for, right?)
so heres how it goes. first i had to switch the little dials on the rotators to 001 and 004, because each uses 3 channels. then i had to hook the dmx cable into DMX 2, which im not completely sure why, even tho the guy explained it. but anyways, then i patched dimmers 513-518 to some random unused channels, and voila! now they work and we can control them from the board.
we're going to experiment a little and see if theres an easier way to change the effects than typing it in by channel number. maybe the submasters? we tried that but for some reason it didnt seem to be working.

anyways. they work. and that makes me relieved. hopefully they look alright, i still havent seen the gobos that were ordered for them. *sigh.. wish me luck!

and thanks SO MUCH for everyone's help!!
 
You have seen one of the very common problems with setting up addresses for DMX DEVICES, namely that you need to make sure that your account for all the channels, as far as DMX is concerned you have 3 devices.
When you have a dmx control channel that requires a specific value to achieve a specific effect, being able to type it in is more precise than attempting to get it with a fader.

The reason for using DMX2 was that the person helping you then did not have to worry about any other devices sharing the same address. To make the device work in the same universe as your other devices you would need to find an open address space and then set the DMX address to that starting value, increment based on the number of channels, and set the second device... for example say 200 plus was available, so you would then set the address wheels to 200 and then on the second units 204 etc, then you would enter the values that you need for the effects to that address. Starting on dmx2 allowed them to help you set it up with out worrying about other devices. Of course you had to then connect these devices into a different wiring connection back to dmx2
Sharyn
 
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I'm glad the technical part of the production (console patching and such) has been worked out. Now the big question- how did the performance go for you?

Pix would be good too! :)
 

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