Vixen as a FC-4 programmer

[livinlowe]

Jon-
I was reading in another post that you used Vixen to program the lights for your demo at the midwest haunters convention. I've been on the forums at vixen, and looked quickly at the documentation for the FC-4, but I am unclear how you used vixen to set up the light show. Could you point me in the right direction?? ;D

Shahwn(just having fun with that)

[JonnyMac]

Well, first I created a cable to go between my PC and the FC-4; here's the schematic:



Then I used the FC-4 driver for Vixen which we have not released (I've attached it to this post).  Put the .DLL file into the Vixen/Plugins folder and then pull it into a project.  Channels 1 through 4 will be assigned to board %00, 5 - 8 to board %01, etc.  Be sure to set the Vixen driver to 38.4K baud to get the best performance, and install the B/R jumpers on your board(s). 

From this point Vixen is used as it's intended -- as a lighting controller.  The FC-4 gives you 0% to 100% dimming on all channels (up to 16 per comm port).

[gadget-evilusions]

That is really cool. Seeing that you connect to pins 5 and 3 for the first board, which ones do you connect to for the other 3?

channels 1-4 %00 Pins 5 and 3
channels 5-8 %01 Pins ? and ?
channels 9-12 %?? Pins ? and ?
channels 13-16 %?? Pins ? and ?

I have a project that this might be incredibly helpful for vs using a prop-1 or prop-2.

[JonnyMac]

The boards are daisy-chained -- just like they were being controlled from a Prop-1, Prop-2 or Prop-SX

  PC --> FC-4.%00 --> FC-4.%01 --> FC-4.%10 --> FC-4.%11

In a Vixen project that uses the FC-4 you can only have 16 channels.  Vixen channels 1 - 4 go to FC-4 board %00, 4 - 8 go to board %01, etc.

The cool thing is that with Vixen you can coordinate the lamp levels with an audio track.

[gadget-evilusions]

Awesome. Thanks. I am going to have to order 3 more FC-4s after this season and try that.