I was working in a different theater last week and we started talking about
DMX splitters and how they would be fairly useful in my theater. I have two
FOH trusses on motors that are easily lowered for hang and
strike. On these trusses I have Varilites and traditionally have used I-cues as well. It would be great to have separate chains of
DMX for the Varilites versus the I-cues or perhaps in the future
Gobo rotators, effects wheels, or color scrollers. Currently there is one
DMX cable run to each
Truss. Therefore, I'm looking for a small
DMX splitter to sit on each
truss with two to four out-puts. Also, since I'm in the market I also would like a splitter on
stage where there is only one
DMX input for the entire
stage and all battens. This one could be larger but would be nice if it could be pipe mounted to the permanent side pipes before going to each
batten.
Would love input and to start a dialogue about
DMX splitters
Let me ask a couple questions. Why do you need to split the signal on your
FOH trusses? The Vari*Lites, ICues, and any other
DMX toys don't care if they are daisy chained or on separate lines. It requires the same amount of cable either way, and if you run separate lines then you need more terminators. I only run one
DMX line to a position unless I need more than one
universe, in which case you actually need multiple lines and not a splitter.
As for on your
deck and overhead battens, I would suggest putting an
opto in on the
deck and running a
line up to the
grid with another
opto on the
grid. Then from the
grid you can make drops to any
batten that needs data. This will keep the cable clutter to a minimum as you won't have to lift data from the
deck to battens.
As far as splitters go, the
Doug Fleenor gear is kind of the industry standard. A little on the pricey side, but it is rock solid. I have also had success with the Elation
DMX Branch 4 splitter, much less expensive, bluky, and not as rugged, but it works.
The other way to go depends on what
console you are running. Most newer consoles allow you to output data over TCP/IP on
Cat5 cable to proprietary nodes or gateways. With
Strand you have the N21 show net nodes, with
ETC you have the Net3
DMX gateways, HOGs have one, GrandMA has them,
etc. So you could run
Cat5 from your
console to your lighting positions and then install nodes. The beauty of nodes is that they can be configured to output any range of 512 addresses per output, so you can configure them however suits you. Also,
Cat5 is much cheaper to run than
DMX and you can use standard
network gear to hook it all up.
