Okay i’m sorry i’m really un experienced with IQs so if when your explaining explain it a little watered down so i can understand. The IQs were working a few months ago, i honestly think it’s the patch, i still don’t understand how patching 515 to
channel 32 makes the pan of the mirror move like i don’t even know how that works. if i did i could reset the whole patch for them. either way, i have to make sure the black box that all the cables from the IQs are plugged into run all the way to the board?? (what is
DMX and what do you mean by second
universe and pin cable ). i’m sorry, thanks for the help!!
All good my friend. I'll go out on a limb and say that everybody here on Control Booth has been where you are. OK, so let's go through some quick basics.
DMX is the language that your lighting board "speaks" to tell things what to do. It does this in groups of 512 control channels called "universes" (so the first
DMX output on the board will control channels 1-512 and the second
DMX output will control the SECOND
universe of channels 513-1024. But you can also
express channel 513 as 2/1 because it's the SECOND
universe, FIRST
channel. So 1024 could also be called 2/512--channel 512 in the SECOND
universe. )
Now, back when all we had were dimmers, and the only
parameter we had to control was the
intensity of a light, it was easy. When you patched
circuit /
dimmer 4 into
channel 31, when you brought up that
channel, you would bring up the
intensity of the light that was plugged into that
circuit /
dimmer. But NOW, we can control a bunch of other parameters OTHER than
intensity. Like, say, the pan of a mirror. That would take a control
channel. Or the tilt of a mirror. That would take another control
channel. (When you get into
LED lights, you end up needing a BUNCH of control channels to individually control the
intensity of, say, 7 different colours of
LED emitters, plus
strobe rate, and other stuff. Even more if it's a MOVING
LED light. So sometimes you can have a single
LED light needing a couple DOZEN control channels to control it. This would quickly overwhelm an
Express board, so thankfully we're just dealing with IQ mirrors that have fewer parameters.)
IQs can actually be controlled with 2 channels (which is what it sounds like yours are set to) or 4 channels, where pan and tilt are given TWO channels each--one course and one fine for more control.
So when you patch:
Ch 31 @ 4
Ch 32 @ 515
Ch 33 @ 516
All you are doing is taking control channels that aren't sequential, and grouping them so that they can be used together. And it looks like your FIRST
universe (
DMX 1-512 remember?) are talking to your dimmers--the things that just control the
intensity of the lights by controlling the
power they get--and your SECOND
universe is talking to your IQ mirrors (
DMX 513-1024, or 2/1-2/512 if you prefer).
So....the second
universe of
DMX, in order to provide
power to your IQs, needs to go to a
power supply first, because those channels that are telling the mirror to move, need to be supported by
power to MAKE the mirror move. That's why you need to make sure that this
power supply hasn't been accidentally unplugged. Otherwise, the
Express could be telling the mirror to move, but it won't have any
power to do anything about it. Now you might have noticed that a
DMX cable has 5 pins (it actually only uses 3 of those pins, but that's another discussion. But if you see 3 pin
DMX cable, now you know why that's possible). The 5 pin
DMX goes into the
power supply, and the outputs are now FOUR pin, because now the cable has to transmit control AND
power.
Personally, I think there's a problem with the
power supply, like it's not plugged in. Hope the rest makes sense.
