Vixen and Smart Strings

[dridas]

New here, so please forgive me if I'm in the wrong forum, or the question has already been addressed.

I'm trying to use Vixen in order to decide what I want to do next year (2012), since I just found this site.

I'd like to use Smart Strings for outlining my roof.  It's my understanding that each node of a SS is 4 channels, or maybe 3? Either way, Vixen doesn't combine these channels for RGB output.  I'm adding each bulb, and each channel.  This seems impractical for setting it up using the Adjustable Preview.

Is there an easy way to combine the channels for the Smart Strings?

I was playing with LOR, and really wanted to give Vixen a shot. LOR (i think) allows making the channels RGB? 

Any help is appreciated. I'm new, so please be forgiving if I just missed something.

[rrowan]

Hi

I am using Vixen with smart strings this year. I started to enter in all of those channels to the grid and quickly decided there has to be a better way. So I try excel and that was a little bit better but not much. Finally I decided to write a program in visual basic to layout my show.

The program is in the wiki missed named VSB. There is more detail in this post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

For the preview I am just too lazy to do all of the colors so I just cheat and do a couple so I know its working but not get the full effect.


btw: No reason for asking for forgiveness 
We try to be a friendly helpful bunch with no tolerance to folks doing personal attacks. RJ the owner of the site set up DLA for the beginners.

Hope that helps

Rick R.

[dridas]

Rick,
  thanks, and that is a step in the right direction. I don't have anything for lights this year, and am trying to get things rolling for next year- I'd hope I could manage a nice starter show with a year to plan. Need to order PCB's from RJ, and get parts. No coops going on right now, but hopefully soon enough.

It would be nice to be able to have 1 bulb on the visualizer that was RGB, and color determined by that corresponding channel/node in the sequencer- IE....you could pick the color on the sequencer, and it would translate it to the right color.

As I understand it- each node of a SS is 3 channels? If those 3 channels were combined in vixen, and you just selected the color...wouldn't that make sense?

[rrowan]

Last year (before RGB lights) I have a few items with multi color on it (window frames, mini trees) that I put the color on top of each other. Normally I would get some shade of brown on the screen if 2 or more colors were on.

A note about RGB lights and color charts. They won't be the same color. The blending process is not the same

Example Halloween Orange. I am using Red = 150, Green = 21, Blue = 0
now the color charts say it should be something like Red = 255, Green = 102, Blue = 51

Trust me that won't be Orange with RGB LEDs. The blue is a stronger color and over runs green and some of the red.
I wrote another program called ColorFinder that allows you to play with the colors until you find the color you want. Then just put those values in Vixen.

Rick R.

[smartcontrols]

RGB lights are fairly new and smart strings are very new. It is taking time for all the software packages it get caught up to be good at handling the needs of all this new hardware. KC (the owner of Vixen) and his group are currently working on writing Vixen version 3.0 now, but it is not expected to be out until early next year. It is being designed to combine the channels so it can handle the RGB type nodes easily. Now that the hardware is becoming available I think you will see a lot of improvement in all the software over the next year.

[dridas]

That's good news, and I surely have plenty of time. This year will be unanimated, but am hoping to be able to jump in pretty heavily next year.  Thanks for the info- can't wait for Vixen 3.0!