DMX Laser Control

Hey guys,

I just purchased an Enttec usb dmx pro and a 1W rgb laser. I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what the laser is expecting to receive for a dmx signal. Has anyone found any good sources for setting the dip switches in the back of the unit and figuring out what channels correspond to what features of the unit? What should the channels be named?

Unfortunately I have no documentation for the laser and the manufacture label has been removed. It has standard 3 pin DMX and serial IDLA ports in the back.

How do you give each DMX fixture a unique ID an broadcast to just it?

Any examples would be great! I also have a bunch of DMX led par cans on the way so I’m hoping I’ll be able to daisy chain together.

Thanks!

I think they tend to all be the same. There are various charts available online. Here’s a calculator for DMX dip switch addresses: sabretechnology.co.uk/calc.asp

Typically you set the address of the first channel of the device and then the additional functions of the device are just offset from that first channel. Example: if you program it to be on channel 10. channel 10 might be the brightness and channel 1 might be the pan function on the scanner. As far as what corresponds to what… there’s no way of knowing without finding a manual. Try turning a few channels all the way up. See if you can get the laser to turn on and then experiment with different channels to see what they do. On some equipment, you have 16 bits of control for certain functions (two contiguous channels), like pan and tilt. This would mean that channel 11 might be the the “coarse” control and channel 12 might be the “fine” control. Good luck.

Thanks! That was really helpful. I also found this website:

laserfx.com/

They have some pretty good information about safety.

I am in a similar situation. I got a DMX laser device and a Chauvet DMX-ArtNet adapter but I can’t seem to get the laser to respond to anything that I send to it.
Touch can see the ArtNet adapter, and it seems to be able to send to that, but the laser doesn’t seem to respond.
What are the value ranges for the input? Are they 0-255 integers? Or floating point 0.0-1.0 that gets scaled (like in normalized mode for MIDI I/O)?
The docs imply that the order of the channels is what’s important rather than the naming. Is that correct?
If you need to output to channel 40, do you need to have 39 blank channels before that?

If anyone has an example project that at least shows how things are supposed to be wired up and what kind of values to use, that would be really helpful. The documentation is a bit vague.

jcelectronic.en.made-in-china.c … Light.html

Yeah, pretty annoying that there doesn’t seem to be a dmx spec sheet for that particular unit online. This is pretty typical for Chinese fixtures. Did it have any documentation in the box?

I think the laser I was working with at the time I created this thread used the first 3 dmx channels for color (just on and off in my case) and the 4th channel to select patterns. I think it had a few more channels to animate trans/rotate/scale for whichever pattern was selected.

DMX value range is 0-255 integers so you should definitely be sending that. Try setting your first 3 channels to 255 and see if you get anything. One of those channels might be intensity and you might also have individual intensity for each color. Also good to make sure the dmx address is set correctly on the device. Should be 1 and you might need to check that it is in a dmx slave mode which is usually an option for most china fixtures.

Yes, if you are trying to output to channel 40 you will need to send 39 blank channels before that. Sometimes I just use many constant chops plugged into a merge but there are lots of ways to go about this. Eventually you’ll probably want to make a component with custom parameters for each of the channels. Then you could just use a parameter chop.

Here’s a component that matthewwachter and i built a while back when we had to deal with a bunch of random fixtures. I’ve gone back and done some cleanup to make it more self explanatory / user friendly, so it’s now DMXUnfucker-v2

Please note that the channels are 1-indexed as this is how we usually discuss them – dmx channel 1 is referenced by the component pars as channel 1, not channel 0, and corresponds to the output channel ‘dmxchan1’.

functionality:
-send random values to all channels - useful if you just need to see ‘is anything working’
-set a single channel to a specific value
-turn a single channel off
-set a range of channels to a specific value
-turn a range of channels off

single channel and range of channel selections are applied at the time a pulse is sent for their respective commands, so you can freely control a universe of DMX this way by changing channel selections and then pulsing buttons.

You can use DMXUnfucker as both a diagnostic / testing tool and a means to send specific dmx channel data as part of your project. We’ve found this handy especially handy when dealing with dmx fixtures that we can’t necessarily change the addressing on. The output of the component is a full dmx universe worth of channels that can be easily selected and shuffled as needed.
DMXUnfucker-v2.tox (2.26 KB)

Thanks! That’s a helpful tool.
I think there’s a problem with the Chauvet DMX-AN device so the laser isn’t getting any of the output.
Going to do some research about that.