Tips on rotating fixtures within pixel matrices, and how to split a composite fixture into individual nodes.
Archive for the ‘tips & tricks’ Category
KiNet PSU Discovery
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011With a Pharos control system, you can discover and patch KiNet power supplies with ease. The discovery system allows you to pre-patch fixtures onto KiNet power supplies offline, and then associate discovered power supplies with the patched power supplies when you’re ready to commission the project.
Using discovery to find KiNet power supplies on the same network as the computer running Pharos Designer is a simple process. In the Patch view of Designer, select KiNet from the tabs of different protocols. You’ll see something similar to the screenshot below:
KiNet tab in patch
Let’s first take the case where you are starting a new project. If your power supplies are on the same network as Designer then you can discover them now by clicking the ‘Discover’ button. When discovery is complete, click on the ‘Show Discovered’ button to see a table of discovered power supplies. Select the power supply you want to add to your project by pressing the button on the left of the table row and click ‘Add Selected to Project’. Alternatively, you can click ‘Add All To Project’ to add all of the discovered power supplies to the project at once. You can now patch your fixtures to the power supplies.
KiNet Discovery in progress
Now let’s say you’ve patched fixtures to power supplies offline but don’t know the IP addresses of the real power supplies. For this example we have created a new power supply by going to the Patch view of Designer and clicking on the ‘Add’ button in the Protocols tab on the right of the application window. It is crucial that you select the correct type of power supply in preparation for associating later. We have patched a 2×2 iTile to the power supply, which we have named ‘iTile’ for reference.
Adding a PSU offline
With Designer on the same network as the power supply, click the ‘Discover’ button as before then select the discovered power supply that you want to associate. Select the pre-patched power supply from the Power Supply list (‘iTile’ in the case of our example) and click the ‘Apply Selected to Power Supply’ button.
Linking discovered PSUs
It’s worth noting that if you have multiple network interfaces active on your computer, Designer will ask you which interface you want to use to discover power supplies. Every time you click ‘Discover’ the table of discovered power supplies will be emptied and then repopulated with the power supplies on the chosen network interface.
For more information on patching in Pharos Designer, see this page on our online help.
Screencast: Simulating Timelines with Audio
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011If you’re programming lighting that needs to be synchronised with an audio track then Pharos Designer has a great feature to let you simulate the two together by using Winamp as a timecode source.
This screencast is also available via our iTunes podcast.
Explaining Layouts in Interface Editor
Friday, December 2nd, 2011Pharos Interface Editor comes with several page layouts for you to use, but many projects will require custom layouts.
To create your own layouts for Interface Editor, you will need to understand how the XML in the layout files translates to the positions of items on the screen of the TPC. To help you get started, I will use the example of the ‘4 Button 6 Slider’ layout which comes with Interface Editor. To find the XML file behind this layout on Windows, navigate to /Program Files/Pharos/Interface Editor/library/layout/. On Mac OS X, right-click Pharos Interface Editor in your Applications folder and select ‘Show Package Contents’, then browse to /Content/Resources/layout/. Look for the file named ‘4_button_6_slider.xml’ in this folder. A screenshot containing the text in the XML file is below for reference. It’s a good idea to get a text editor that can handle XML when working with custom layouts, such as Notepad++.
Example XML
The first line defines the properties of the layout. Here you can change the name of the layout as it appears in the New Page wizard in Interface Editor, but note that two layouts can’t have the same name, otherwise only one will be available in Interface Editor. You can also change the orientation of the layout between landscape and portrait. Removing the ‘orientation’ attribute will allow the layout to be used in both orientations – some layouts are more flexible than others.
The next line is the start of an hbox, which stands for ‘horizontal box’. The hbox is one of two types of layout box that are available; the other is the vbox. These boxes are used to contain a number of different items and the direction of the layout of these items is decided by the type of box you put them in. A vbox arranges items from top to bottom and an hbox arranges items from left to right. Boxes can contain other boxes, as shown in this example: the top level hbox contains a vbox and an hbox.
Boxes support a spacing and a margin attribute. The spacing is the measurement in pixels between each item; the margin is the number of pixels between the outline of the box and the items inside.
Boxes in a Layout
In the vbox shown, there are four buttons, each 10 pixels from its neighbour. In the XML file, you can see that there’s a spacer at the top and bottom of the list of items in the vbox. The spacers push the items together as far as the box’s spacing attribute will allow – otherwise they’d spread out to fill the space available.
If you look at the button definitions in the XML file, you can see that it’s possible to specify a width and height, though this is optional – items will distribute themselves evenly and expand to fill the available space in their box if you don’t provide this information. The lower hbox in the XML file contains the sliders. You can see that this appears next to the vbox in the image above because it’s inside the top level hbox.
Another way of laying out items is in a grid. This method allows you to easily layout items in rows and columns. The screen shot below shows the XML for the ‘12 buttons’ layout, which you can find in the same folder as the previous layout. As you can see, 4 rows and 3 columns have been specified, along with a spacing and margin of 10 pixels. This will distribute the listed buttons around the grid and separate them by 10 pixels in each direction. These grids can be used in boxes, allowing for complex, nested layouts to be created with ease.
Grid XML Example
The items that you have available to you are button, slider, label, keypad, colourpicker and spacer.
Next time, we will look at how to create your own custom layouts. If you feel like having a go now, make sure you save your layouts in the directory /Documents/Pharos/Interface Editor/Layouts/ to ensure they do not get deleted if you uninstall Interface Editor.
Using Control Keys with the TPC
Thursday, December 1st, 2011Simply put, a control key is a string of characters that links an object in Interface Editor to a trigger in Designer. When you are creating an interface for the Touch Panel Controller, you can assign a control key to each item in Interface Editor. These items – buttons, sliders, colour pickers and keypads – can be given any control key that you wish. By default, the items are given a unique control key that relates to the type of item and the order that it was created in. For example, the first button from the top left of the first page created is assigned the key of ‘button001’. In smaller projects, you might want to rename these control keys to something that relates to what the button does, so it’s easy to keep track of what buttons you want to trigger with.
Property Editor
In this example, the buttons have captions which appear on the item, and we have given them a key that relates to their caption. You edit the key in the property editor, found on the right of the application window. Here, for the ‘Activate’ button, we have assigned the key ‘activate’ which will be very easy to assign when we come to setup triggers in Designer.
Once you have linked your Interface Editor project to a TPC in your Designer project, you can start creating triggers. Have a look at the controller properties section of the Designer online help for more information about linking Interface Editor projects to TPCs.
Trigger in Designer
The first thing to do when creating triggers for the TPC is to set the controller number to the relevant controller in your project. This populates the trigger parameter editors with control keys from your Interface Editor project. As you can see in the screenshot, when creating a TPC Button trigger, the control keys that we assigned to the buttons have been added to the drop down menu, making it simple to link your buttons to triggers.
For larger, more complex files, it’s a good idea to leave the control keys as their defaults. This enables you to use one trigger to respond to multiple items by capturing the number in the control key as a variable. You can do this using the standard variable capturing syntax used in Serial and Ethernet triggers, for example you would type ‘button<3d>’ into the button name box to match any button with a default control key, capturing the number as variable 1. You can then use this in an action or a script just as you would with any other variable.
Please have a look at our online help for more information on TPC triggering and on using variables in trigger actions.
Flagging up Flags
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011Flags are an often underutilised feature in the Pharos Designer software. However, they are very useful, as they allow triggers to be placed in a timeline.
Timeline with Flags
This image shows a timeline called ‘Media On’ that plays back video content on a matrix. As you can see, flags have been placed at 5 second intervals along the timeline.
Flag Triggers
The flag triggers shown here relate to the flags on the timeline above. These triggers start a short timeline that creates an impactful, flashing lighting effect using a timeline called ‘Spike’. More interestingly, they also close an output contact on a Pharos RIO 08.
Flag Trigger Setup
Contact closures can be used to activate relays, which in this example fire pyrotechnic devices. Setting up flags as triggers is simple: just add a trigger with Flag set as the trigger type and change the parameters to correspond to the relevant flag. You can then add actions just like you would with any other trigger.
For more information on triggers, see this page in our online help.
Fine-tuning a Timeline Element
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011When adjusting the length of a timeline element, the default behaviour is for elements to snap to the nearest tenth of a second. Sometimes, you may need to be more specific than this.
Precise adjust of timeline element
In this example, we have a media clip that we want to last for 18.36 seconds. A quick way to fine-tune the duration of this element is to hold down Shift whilst dragging the end handles which allows you to adjust the timing to the nearest hundredth of a second.
This method also works for moving an element on a timeline, although you often want an element to snap to the end of another element, in which case simply hold down Control whilst dragging.
For other handy keyboard shortcuts, see this page in our online help.
Note that the start and end times of an element can also be set precisely by entering the values directly in the Timing section of the element properties, shown on the right of the screen.
DMX-in on the AVC!
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010Did you know the AVC can receive DMX directly for triggering?
The AVC’s multi-protocol serial port has always been able to accept either an RS232 or RS485 connection, but we recently enhanced the RS485 functionality to accept a DMX connection too!
We think this has many applications, particularly in theatrical environments where the AVC has already been used as a compact, reliable solution for delivering video projection content as part of a production. A single DMX channel from a lighting console can control multiple timelines thanks to Pharos Designer’s flexible trigger interface and the new AVC Master action allows a DMX channel to master the intensity of the AVC’s output.
Don’t forget that the AVC’s serial port has great potential in other applications too; often a projector or video screen will have a serial port, so as well as delivering the content, the AVC can also be programmed to control the display device for functions such as lamp on/off, zoom, etc.
Screencast: Colour Chase Preset
Thursday, November 19th, 2009The group presets in Designer are often overlooked in favour of the matrix presets, but they have some great features. This screencast takes you on a quick tour of the Colour Chase preset.
Screencast: RS232 Input Trigger & Variables
Friday, November 13th, 2009In this screencast we show how the RS232 Input trigger can be configured to capture any part of incoming serial data as a variable. This allows a Pharos controller to be triggered by a third-party user interface with minimal effort.
This is the last of three screencasts covering the basics of using variables in triggers in Pharos Designer. Next week we’ll move on to a new topic.
