EMJ
Member
Hi,
I'm hoping maybe someone can get me on the right track with getting some Strand N21 DMX nodes working at my kids high school.
Here's the background: The school was built about 15 years ago and most everything is original to it's construction. It's got a Strand Preset Palette 32/64 with 300 channels for a board and two racks of Strand C21 dimmers. 178 dimmer channels total (7 spare bays with blanks) with about 123 of those dimmers for the stage lighting, 30 dimmers for the black box/theater classroom (it has it's own little board) and the remaining 25 dimmers for house lights. The output from the board is a 5 pin DMX on the board side and an ethercon on the wall socket side. There's a network switch in the dimmer room, so it looks like the whole DMX network is Ethernet based. Almost everything they have is conventional dimmer based lighting, with the exception that the building must have come with three VariLite VL1000 TSD movers. So because of that, they have a number of Strand N21 DMX nodes scattered around- I don't know how many yet- there's 4 on the electrics in the theater, but I think there's also 1 or 2 in the theater classroom.
I know the VL1000's were used in the past, but kids graduate and teachers retire, so they haven't been used in a while. I'm not even sure it they still work, but I plan to find out. They also, shortly before I got involved, bought a number of cheep LED lights on Amazon, only to then realize they couldn't really use them on the system. I'm going in to get a good inventory of everything in 2 weeks and I really want to try to get an understanding of how to connect with the N21 DMX nodes so we can start trying to use the VL1000's and LED color changers.
I've downloaded the N21 Node manual and played with the settings on the board a little. The N21 nodes are powered up and I didn't see any obvious issue in the board settings. I've tried just plugging in an LED color changer, setting it to a channel range and running that up on the board, and nothing happened. However, the only chance I've really had to look at them and play around was when they had a show in production, so I didn't want to freak them out by creating a new show file and messing around too much. When I go in in a couple weeks, I should be able to start from scratch and see if it was an issue of assigning channels during show setup.
Does anyone have any thoughts, recommendations or advice for me? I think it's probably all working and there's just a setting or something I'm missing or not understanding. A couple questions (or maybe just rambling thoughts):
1- Would the whole system be running shownet? And if so, what does that mean for connecting to other DMX based lights? The N21 nodes would convert and output DMX 512, right?
2- I mostly come from the pre-moving light world and haven't done a lot of theater since the early 2000's- kids and all- so if the board only has 300 channels, what does that mean for the DMX universe(s)? Does the board let you use any 300 channels you want across 1 or more DMX universes, or just the first 300 channels in the only DMX universe?
3- If there's only 1 DMX to ethercon cable coming out of the board, that would mean there can only be 1 DMX universe, right?? Or is it likely that the the board is outputting shownet even though it's a 5 pin XLR connector coming out of the back of it? Does shownet allow transmission of more than one universe on a single cable?
It seems to me like the easiest way to do this would have been to output the dimmer control on one DMX universe and the other control channels for the movers on a separate universe. Anyone have thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your time and input.
I'm hoping maybe someone can get me on the right track with getting some Strand N21 DMX nodes working at my kids high school.
Here's the background: The school was built about 15 years ago and most everything is original to it's construction. It's got a Strand Preset Palette 32/64 with 300 channels for a board and two racks of Strand C21 dimmers. 178 dimmer channels total (7 spare bays with blanks) with about 123 of those dimmers for the stage lighting, 30 dimmers for the black box/theater classroom (it has it's own little board) and the remaining 25 dimmers for house lights. The output from the board is a 5 pin DMX on the board side and an ethercon on the wall socket side. There's a network switch in the dimmer room, so it looks like the whole DMX network is Ethernet based. Almost everything they have is conventional dimmer based lighting, with the exception that the building must have come with three VariLite VL1000 TSD movers. So because of that, they have a number of Strand N21 DMX nodes scattered around- I don't know how many yet- there's 4 on the electrics in the theater, but I think there's also 1 or 2 in the theater classroom.
I know the VL1000's were used in the past, but kids graduate and teachers retire, so they haven't been used in a while. I'm not even sure it they still work, but I plan to find out. They also, shortly before I got involved, bought a number of cheep LED lights on Amazon, only to then realize they couldn't really use them on the system. I'm going in to get a good inventory of everything in 2 weeks and I really want to try to get an understanding of how to connect with the N21 DMX nodes so we can start trying to use the VL1000's and LED color changers.
I've downloaded the N21 Node manual and played with the settings on the board a little. The N21 nodes are powered up and I didn't see any obvious issue in the board settings. I've tried just plugging in an LED color changer, setting it to a channel range and running that up on the board, and nothing happened. However, the only chance I've really had to look at them and play around was when they had a show in production, so I didn't want to freak them out by creating a new show file and messing around too much. When I go in in a couple weeks, I should be able to start from scratch and see if it was an issue of assigning channels during show setup.
Does anyone have any thoughts, recommendations or advice for me? I think it's probably all working and there's just a setting or something I'm missing or not understanding. A couple questions (or maybe just rambling thoughts):
1- Would the whole system be running shownet? And if so, what does that mean for connecting to other DMX based lights? The N21 nodes would convert and output DMX 512, right?
2- I mostly come from the pre-moving light world and haven't done a lot of theater since the early 2000's- kids and all- so if the board only has 300 channels, what does that mean for the DMX universe(s)? Does the board let you use any 300 channels you want across 1 or more DMX universes, or just the first 300 channels in the only DMX universe?
3- If there's only 1 DMX to ethercon cable coming out of the board, that would mean there can only be 1 DMX universe, right?? Or is it likely that the the board is outputting shownet even though it's a 5 pin XLR connector coming out of the back of it? Does shownet allow transmission of more than one universe on a single cable?
It seems to me like the easiest way to do this would have been to output the dimmer control on one DMX universe and the other control channels for the movers on a separate universe. Anyone have thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your time and input.
