Proprietary DMX Circuitry

DIY STUFF
1

I feel like I am getting a good grasp of the basics of DMX and I have a pretty basic system up and running. Now I am trying to figure out how to work with these:

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It is a group of 8x8 mirrored floor tiles. They are connected in columns of 8 and each column goes to a control box.

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They have 8 dmx channels - a master fade, red, green, blue, strobe, speed, and a “program” channel that can run custom programs.

The manual is pretty sparse and the build quality dubious at best. Currently I have all of my DMX controls running through QLC+ on a laptop. I can control the entire floor as a single entity but discreet control over individual tiles is eluding me - which is unfortunately exactly what I need to do!

I’m sure it can be done - the pre loaded animations certainly can. The proprietary software that I found for it that they use to make animations is convoluted and apparently requires Solidworks (which I dont have). I dont suppose anyone would be able to help me to hack these a bit?

2

You’d need to set each to a different starting channel. I suppose there is some dipswitch or button to change the channel?

3

Sounds plausible,

@zorch what do you mean by the inbuilt animations?

Link to the manual?

i would create a new fixture in QLC+ once i understood the unit. makes life much easier,.

4

I’m not sure how well things will send through here - but I uploaded pretty much everything that I have scraped together all in one place. I made a QLC fixture, created a mockup of the menu system on the control box, and uploaded all of the software that came with it.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_jyCTvlhlZXLhLW7OlNPzz8ANNuAE5eL?usp=sharing

The “program” channel cycles through all of the pre built animations (in the mysterious .fsd format). There are 65 of them.

I think this PDF -

Is attempting to explain how to generate new animations, but I have yet to make it past AUTOCAD portion of the instructions.

The object is to get light arrangements like this:

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I’ve rotated the orientation of the floor to reflect how it is installed - the wires have to come out of the “bottom” edge since it butts up against walls on the other sides.

5

Told ya! It is all done with mirros (and smoke).

6

wow that’s over complex… Never heard of using autocad for lighting and how many people use or have access to it??

I suspect most users of this product go for Sound-To-Light and let it do it’s own thing…

Looks like a profuct where “Somebody Loves It” and only they have a clue.

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7

Would there be any harm in taking one of the mini-xlr cables (that go to the control box), run it through an adapter and then plug it into a DMX control console?

8

I would suspect the boxes are just serial addressable LED’s . You would have to understand that and then build a DMX to adressable driver ( not hard ) I would imagine your going to run out of channels quikly if each LED is 3 chanels it only allows for 170 “Pixels”. But without any details on the product it’s a bit difficult.

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