Some help please. . .

[adude23]

Right to cut a long story short,
I've got a strand 300 (125 channel version) with conventional dimmers plugged in. At the moment i have about 60/70 conventional's in the board.

What i now want to do is connect some led par cans to the desk as well as the dimmers, now how do i do this? I know i can't put them into the dimmers and therefore need to get a seperate power feed to them (that i have no problem with) I have daisy chained them up using three pin dmx but this is where i get stuck... Do i now have to take a DMX line from the pars and plug it in separately to the desk in someway that makes them different to the dimmers? Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks guys
~Adude~

 

[philhaney]

Right to cut a long story short,
What i now want to do is connect some led par cans to the desk as well as the dimmers, now how do i do this? I know i can't put them into the dimmers and therefore need to get a seperate power feed to them (that i have no problem with) I have daisy chained them up using three pin dmx but this is where i get stuck... Do i now have to take a DMX line from the pars and plug it in separately to the desk in someway that makes them different to the dimmers? Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks guys
~Adude~

I may be out of line here (meaning I have no DMX experience personaly, so this may not work), but If I understand you correctly you have daisy chained your LED pars together using 3-pin DMX cables and you also have a DMX cable running from your desk to your conventional dimmers? If so, can you run a DMX cable (using a 3 to 4 or 5 pin adaptor if necessary) from your conventional dimmers to your LED pars and give them all different DMX addresses?

 

[atrom81]

The DMX from the pars either needs to run back to the board, and run on the second DMX port (513-1024).

Or if you can get to your dimmers, and they have a DMX out, you should be able to run the DMX to there. Just be sure to assign the starting DMX value on your LED's to the right number (the last channel your dimmers go to, plus one). You might need a 3-5 pin adapter depending on what your dimmers use.

 

[DaveySimps]

You can chain it together as indicated in the previous posts. If you do not have a DMX out on your dimmer rack or a second universe of DMX out of your board, you will have to buy a DMX splitter to split the signal. Plug the output of your board into the splitter and take one output and send it to your dimmers. Take a second output and send it to your scrollers.

Opto Splitters are great. The nice thing about opto splitters it the optical isolation limits potential fault propagation. i.e if the DMX run to your LED's has a fault, it will not travel down the wire and effect the DMX signal to your dimmers. Overall, it is a more stable system.

~Dave

Doug Fleenor Design - Standard Splitters
Elation DMX-Branch/4

 

[icewolf08]

I find that the easiest thing to do is connect your intelligent gear to universe 2. To do this, you would run your DMX line to the DMX2 port on the back of the CPU. Then in the setup screen you need to enable DMX2 to output 513-1024 (or whatever outputs you want them to be)

Now, address your units starting at 1. Why? While the console thinks of the first address in universe 2 as 513, it is actually address 1 on that universe. So as i said, first fixture is 1, then next is offset by the amount of addresses (outputs) that each unit needs. Then in patch your first unit would be output 513 OR 2.1, you can enter it either way.

When you don't have tons of intelligent gear, this method helps me keep things organized and makes troubleshooting easier. I can go further into an explanation of patching for this if needed, but I think that I have done that recently in another thread.

 

[derekleffew]

...You might need a 3-5 pin adapter depending on what your dimmers use.

When specifying adapters, MALE end first, always! One would therefore want/need a 5-3 pin adapter.

 

[adude23]

Cheers guys i will have a look at the dimmers tonight (in total we have four) and will see if there is any sort of DMX out and then i will know whether i will indeed just put them all on seperate universe's
cheers guys
~Adude~

 

[adude23]

Right have had a look and i'm gona run them on a second universe i will keep you posted to how this goes thanks for the help guys
~Ash~

 

[len]

Another nit-pick, but officially, dmx is ONLY a 5-pin xlr connection. Anything else can be called "data" but is not dmx.

Simplest is go out of the dimmer rack but that may not be available. Either way, I'd still spend the $ on a splitter. Not only will it give you more connectability, but if you get a decent one, there will be less data errors and a stronger, cleaner signal. If you choose to run the LED off universe 2, you'll need a separate splitter for each universe, although since the dimmers have been fine before, it's probably not necessary to put a splitter on universe 1. One other advantage of using two universes is that if you have a problem, it eliminates some places that you would need to troubleshoot. Also allows you to have some lights on if the other universe fails mid-show.