When creating a DMX Channel, the parameter sequence block gets an index. If you create a channel that is 16bit or higher, the following indices don’t match the DMX channel indices. So in this example the with a 16bit Dimmer, the dimmer takes up DMX channel 1 and 2, and shutter takes up channel 3.
I just had to create a big fixture profile for the ROBE Tetra2 (mode 4), which has several 16bit channels, and after a while it gets really tedious to see whether you’re copying the data correctly.
Is there a way to make this easier? I totally get that the sequence blocks have to keep their index, but maybe there is an option to also display which channels the block is taking up.
So for a 16 bit dimmer the collapsed line could look something like this:
I don’t think this would work outside of a few specific cases.
There are so many variables (eg. fixture gap, quantizing, input prim/point size, resolution, interleaving, merging etc.) that are used to map a sequence block to channel indices, and sequence blocks can even be merged together. And if the profile spans multiple universes or the input has multiple primitives, then each primitive may not map to the same set of channels for the given block, or within the different universe. Another problem is that point value types are iterated over for each point and could therefore cover a huge universe/channel range.
In your example, I think you could consolidate a lot of those blocks:
eg. Background, Flower Effect 1, Flower Effect 2 seem like they could all each be contained within their own block, except for maybe Background Dimmer intensity which is 16-bit, but that can be separated then merged with the above block so they’re still interleaved.
However, if you do want to leave it structured as-is, I think manually adding extra information to each of the DMX Channel names (eg. [1,2] in front of Dimmer) could work to solve the readability problem.
as a little addendum to @eric.b message, I thought it might make sense to add the fixture as we would see it setup. Main idea here is that the fixture itself is a primitive (a single line strip) with 18 points, each point symbolizing a LED. This way fixture based controls like Dimmer or BGColor can be primitive attributes while only the LEDs are point attributes.
The DMX Fixture POP will now loop over each primitive (in this case one single fixture) and extract all primitive attributes (in this case I only created the attribute for the Tilt channel, all other channels are set to constant) and loop over all points for the individual LED colors.
The result is still 25 DMX channels in the Fixture POP but a bit cleaner and a total of 115 dmx channels that are being sent out.
Hi @snaut and @eric.b. Thanks for the replies! I understand the problem and I will stick to manually adding Channel names for readability.
As for the way the fixture is set up, I think I got that working correctly! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I just did my first show using only POPs and it worked like a charm!
