if anyone wants you can stroll on over to my dmx control thread in the how to section to see what im doing. i am doing dmx this year and am going to be running DMeXorcist, enttec open dmx, boc for 3 axis skull, 4 dmx led lights, 3 relay packs.

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todd of the sweenys.
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Since this thread is active I thought I would ask a very rookie question. I really want to have a DMX in our yard haunt but I have absolutely no idea where to start. My rookie question to you is if I have a DMX controller and a dimmer pack, do my lights plug into the dimmer pack and I have control of each individual light? I have about 20 individual lights I would like to control (mostly floods). Can I do this with a DMX controller and dimmers? Are there any really 101 type tutorials on DMX that you could point me to?

Sorry about hijacking this thread, and help is really appreciated!

Melty

to start yourself off I would recommend the following stuff

Enttec Open USB DMX dongle
5-3 pin converter
VSA
Freestyler (free download)
DMX dimmer

To control 20 floods you can chose to have 5 4 channel dimmers and control each light individually or wire your floods in chains of 5 and plug each chain into 1 of the 4 channel dimmer ports

You can then choose to control your lights by creating a sequence in VSA that controls the brightness levels or by using freesyler as a lighting control desk and manually controlling the channels.

To control your lights each channel will have an address allocated to it, with a dimmer pack this is done via a dip switch which allocates addresses to all 4 channels on the pack, ie if you set the dip switch to 100, then the 4 channels will be 100, 101, 102 and 103 (up to 512 channels are available)

You just then use the software to write a value from 0-255 to each channel with 0 being off and 255 being maximum brightness
, with VSA you can tie the process up to a sound file, so if you wanted thunder and lightening then you synch the flashing of the lights with a thunder track and hey presto you have TnL.