Hello all, I have a dozen or so American DJ Par64 LED Fixtures from a few years ago that were bought for a certain project then stored in a closet, (yes I know these fixtures are not top of the line, however they did exactly what we needed at the price we wanted).
I recently installed some new lighting in the main sanctuary, (mac 700 profiles, and some new conventional's), as well as a new Jands Vista Console,(which I love). I decided to pull out the LED Cans and put them in line to do some basic color wash on the corregated plastic underneath the stage. I went to patch the fixtures in, found the dip-switch address sheet on the american dj website and properly addressed the fixtures. I patched these fixtures in on the Vista as what they were, American DJ Par64 LED's, only to discover that when intensity is brought up the cans did a sort-of slow strobing swell. I was able to control color perfectly fine, but all the while the slow swell continued simultaneously. Long story short, after hours in the user manual and a phone call to American DJ (which was not a good choice) I discovered that the fixtures are designed so that channels 1-3 of the 6 dmx channels they occupy are the typical RGB parameters, and 4-6 are strobe, intensity,etc... However the fixture reads all of this through raw dmx value, so somehow when I had the intensity up and did not check the raw dmx output, it was giving it a command to strobe very slowly, so this would not work, I would have to go in and individually control the fixture's color and everything by looking at the raw dmx values, very difficult.
Solution:
I re-patched the fixtures using a 3 channel generic rgb led light, and then skipping 3 dmx channels before patching the next one, therefore bypassing the strobe and other functions. Success! this method worked very well, however, the only parameter I lost was strobe, but can get around this by creating an effect in one of my cues, so no problem. The fixtures have become a very nice compliment to all the rest of my stage lighting including Mac 600's and 700's and some Coemar Pro Spots. Very happy with them for an inexpensive LED fixture. Hope this information was useful to someone somewhere!
I recently installed some new lighting in the main sanctuary, (mac 700 profiles, and some new conventional's), as well as a new Jands Vista Console,(which I love). I decided to pull out the LED Cans and put them in line to do some basic color wash on the corregated plastic underneath the stage. I went to patch the fixtures in, found the dip-switch address sheet on the american dj website and properly addressed the fixtures. I patched these fixtures in on the Vista as what they were, American DJ Par64 LED's, only to discover that when intensity is brought up the cans did a sort-of slow strobing swell. I was able to control color perfectly fine, but all the while the slow swell continued simultaneously. Long story short, after hours in the user manual and a phone call to American DJ (which was not a good choice) I discovered that the fixtures are designed so that channels 1-3 of the 6 dmx channels they occupy are the typical RGB parameters, and 4-6 are strobe, intensity,etc... However the fixture reads all of this through raw dmx value, so somehow when I had the intensity up and did not check the raw dmx output, it was giving it a command to strobe very slowly, so this would not work, I would have to go in and individually control the fixture's color and everything by looking at the raw dmx values, very difficult.
Solution:
I re-patched the fixtures using a 3 channel generic rgb led light, and then skipping 3 dmx channels before patching the next one, therefore bypassing the strobe and other functions. Success! this method worked very well, however, the only parameter I lost was strobe, but can get around this by creating an effect in one of my cues, so no problem. The fixtures have become a very nice compliment to all the rest of my stage lighting including Mac 600's and 700's and some Coemar Pro Spots. Very happy with them for an inexpensive LED fixture. Hope this information was useful to someone somewhere!
