I know, I know, you are all saying “Why in the heck are we doing another dimmer.”  Well the facts are simple really. I love my Lynx dimmer but some of the parts on it have went up so much it is getting to be too expensive a device to really sell the DIY users on.

What I like about the Lynx is that it gives you such a nice linear dimming compared to the Phase angle dimmers like my SSR4 and Freestyle. Now don’t get me wrong they dim fine, in fact as good as any of the pic dimmers. But they do not dim like a Lynx.

So I set out to do two things. First come up with a cost effective replacement dimmer for the Lynx. And second create a pic dimmer that dimed like my Lynx. So I worked out the idea to come up with a dimmer using a very fast pic. Much faster than would normally be used and then increase the resolution of the pulse width modulation by a factor of 4 times. This means there would be 1024 steps of dimming from off to full on. Of course DMX and vixen only gives us 256 steps so it does not seem that this is of any help. But this is where I could use a custom dimming curve to try and get a more linear dimming from it. At some points I might only step one step at a time to slow the fade. And in some parts of the curve I could go 6 times as fast to speed up areas where each dimming step appears to do nothing.

As long as I start at zero and end at 1024 then I had freedom to do as I wish to get the overall linear fading I wanted. I was truely out to try and make each step act the same.  Then I had a thought, since each type of lights acts different. For example a led and a mini light is going to come on at different levels and fade up and down different, what if I could have more than one curve and program the dimmer for the type of lights I had on it. This way the lights would all act the same. Led’s and minis could come on at level 1 and fade up at a close rate to hit their max at 256 at the same time.  I call this Light Normalization. It is the same as what we do with MP3 music to make sure one song is not blowing your eyes off and the next you can not hear.

This lead me to the next thought. What if I want leds on channel #4 and minis on Channel #5?

Well thats when I decided it should be able to have more than one curve in the dimmer at a time and apply them to whatever channels I wanted to.

I think it is a great idea with a lot of potential. So much so that I am researching a patent on it so the the commercial companies can not copy the idea to make more money.

This is where the Lynx Express comes in, it is this dimmer that has these abilities. It is a All in one 16 channel design with built on SSR’s and a max of 40 amps output. Each channel is setup to handle 4 amps. This is a DIY dimmer that is a little less DIY. It is more like a commercial dimmer that you build.

It has a number of options like onboard channel indicating led’s and a 3 digit led display to show the mode it is operating in and start channel address. You can set the address via this interface or you can do it from the software on your computer where you upload the curves to it and set which channel uses which curve.

The Lynx Express will put a device in the DIY hobbiest hands that they can build easily and have something I believe outclasses the commercial controllers costing 5 times the cost.  

Here is a video of the first prototype :

http://diylightanimation.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=517.0;attach=405

It is just in the beta test phase an I have work left to do but I think it might just be a suitable replacement for my trusty old side kick the Lynx.

RJ