DMX Lighting Control Software

December 15, 2017
October 27, 2022
Kinoflo Freestyle LED

Lights such as the Kino Flo Select 31 LED use a DMX control interface to signal changes of light level and color temperature.

DMX is an open protocol and there are a large number of possibilities for hardware and software control. I’ve tried out several of these are more oriented to stage control
 
For DMX controller hardware I have personally tried and will recommend the Enttec DMX USB Pro controller worked well for us.
For computer control software with a user Interface, the one that has worked best for me so far is the Q Light Controller Plus (QLC+) which has nice cross-platform support.
 
For light control software that provides an automated API, the best one I have found, and the one we use to automatically control lights in our lab is the Open Lighting Architecture (OLA). The downside of this is that it only has good support for Linux. I have attached a python script that includes an example OLA calls, along with calls to an isolight puck, which you can overlook.  Here is a basic call to set the lights to middle color temp and maximum intensity:
 
from ola.ClientWrapper import ClientWrapper
intensity = 255
cct       = 127
universe = 1
data      = array.array('B') 
data.append(intensity)
data.append(cct)
data.append(intensity)
data.append(cct)
wrapper = ClientWrapper()
client = wrapper.Client()
client.SendDmx(universe, data, DmxSent)
 
Our goal for Imatest 2020.1 is to have an instrument control interface built into Imatest Master that can directly communicate with DMX hardware.

 

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