xLights 2011d - Starting network and DMX adddress questions

[dmoore]

I finally found this useful nugget of information on how the DMX address is formed in xLights:

"xLights uses the DMX channel mapping defined by LOR. Unit 6, channel 10 goes to DMX channel 90. The formula is DMXch=(u-1)*16+c"

Maybe that also helps someone else...On to my questions...

I am running in "multi-network" mode and I have the following networks defined:

* xLights 1 - e131 / 512 last channel / universe 1
* xLights 2 - e131 / 512 last channel / universe 2
* xLights 3 - e131 / 512 last channel / universe 3
* xLights 4 - e131 / 512 last channel / universe 4

Am I correct to have my LOR sequence arranged so that everything being output as follows:

xLights 1 - LOR LMS:  Network="0"
xLights 2 - LOR LMS:  Network="1"
xLights 3 - LOR LMS:  Network="2"
xLights 4 - LOR LMS:  Network="3"

Should xlights network "1" be blank, starting with 0 or 1?

My net question is - xLights, if every channel in a network has unit "1" - which results in basically a single 512 channel controller from what I can tell - then xLights (in the schedule information window) reads only channels 1-16 output.  Is it really outputting only channels 1-16?  If I bump up one of the "units" to 32 then it reads 512 channels.  How do I get it to map so that one output=a single 512 channel controller with only one "unit"?

Thanks,
David

[frankr]

Hi David,

I know it looks wonky but xLights will read as many channels as you want on unit 1.  I successfully I have my show running with unit=1 on every channel in the non LOR networks.  I use pixelnet so that is 4096 channel on networks 2 and 3 all in unit 1.  The code that prints that message is just assuming that each unit is 16 channels.  It is actually doing the right thing.

Your network configuration should work.  You don't strictly have to mark network 0 in the LMS files (which indeed does map to network 1 in xLigths configuration) as xLights will default any channel definition with no network definition to be 0 (again 1 in xLights configuration)

Update: To be specific, here is the line of code from the converter code that creates the channel index:
chindex=(unit-1)*16+circuit-1

Which is just like you state the formula in your post.  There is no bounds checking on that so circuit can be anything.

Frank

[frankr]

If you want to validate the channels try the version of xConverter attached.  I made some quick modifications to get some extra data out of the conversion process.  This is hard coded to print the max circuit number seen on each of 4 networks.  This is not a mod for the general public but may help you feel better about what xLights is doing.

Note: that this is based on xLights2011d.  I do not recommend using this version for your official conversions. Just as a test for peace of mind.

Frank

[dmoore]

Frank -

Thanks again for the feedback.  In the end what was throwing me off was that LSP wasn't actually exporting effect data for a given group of controllers - so it wasn't xLight mis-configuration, just that the data wasn't there for xLights to output.

Thanks!
david