TroikaTronix Forum: Isadora: Communication & Sensors: LanBox and light control


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LanBox and light control

OlliH
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Dec 5, 2007, 7:21 AM

Post #1 of 6 (1186 views)
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LanBox and light control	Can't Post

Hello everyone!

Greets from Finland. I work as technical designer in museum and I have plans to use isadora on our following exhibition which tells stories about war veterans and war times here in finland 1940 and so on.

The idea is to build up a war veterans house where old war memories are projected on the living room walls. On normal mode the living room is lit with standard house lights, but once in a while light will fade out and war memories (video about fighting and shooting soldiers) will rise up against the walls.

Now the video part is easy, but light control is bit strange for me. Ok, I know that there is this LanBox actor, so I guess I need to get this LanBox device. But how does it work?

Could someone tell me how will I connect LanBox to my Mac Mini?
Is it via ethernet cable? Or Firewire? MIDI?

We have quite good 'eLights' light control system in our museum and one of the dimmerbox have even DMX card in it. Is it perhaps possible to run light control commands from Isadora directly to our light system or do I need to purchase this LanBox device anyway?

Thanks!

Izzy is fantastic! Wink

-Olli

jhoepffner
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Dec 5, 2007, 11:22 PM

Post #2 of 6 (1174 views)
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Re: [OlliH] LanBox and light control [In reply to]	Can't Post

Hello,

Concerning your "elights" control system, I dont know, but many of the theatrical light console can receive midi information and changing the cue. If it's not possible, you need to send DMX informations to your dimmer. Lanbox is made expressly for. With an ethernet cable, you can command light channel directly from Isadora, or you can store cue in lanbox and send order (for the moment via a max patch) to change the cue.

Hope that help

ryancarman
Novice

Dec 10, 2007, 2:42 PM

Post #3 of 6 (1092 views)
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Re: [OlliH] LanBox and light control [In reply to]	Can't Post

you can use the lanbox channels actor to control up to 512 channels of dmx,

so for each of you "memories" you can set up a separate scene in Isadora and when she plays her clip for that particular "memory" you can link the end loop trigger on the movie player to the 'jump' actor to jump ahead to the next scene,
and using a fade time will get you a nice transition

in each of your scenes you set your look for your lights and your in business...

more info on the lanbox available at lanbox.com
and they are sweet, i have three :P

fubbi
Novice

Jul 5, 2008, 1:28 AM

Post #4 of 6 (356 views)
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Re: [ryancarman] LanBox and light control [In reply to]	Can't Post

in reply to an old post.

The midi actors for the lanbox can call LCedit lists and step cues back and forth. making the effort to create lists in LCedit (pain in the b*tt) and then calling them over midi is definitely the best way to get the most out of the lanbox.

this can not be done any other way than with midi at this point.

JoeST
Novice

Jul 5, 2008, 4:51 AM

Post #5 of 6 (355 views)
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Re: [fubbi] LanBox and light control [In reply to]	Can't Post

I'm in the middle of my first theatre project with the Lanbox & Isadora. I've used various set ups before with VJ patches I've made and a few LED pars, but hadn't paid much attention to the Lanbox preformance, despite the odd freeze.

For the current show (Macbook, Tiger, Izzy 2.9.X) using no video output, the Lanbox LCE itself crashed often and mostly unrepeatably. I found a mesage before about the Lanbox channels actor overloading UDP information and deleted all channel actors, replacing them with the rgb video alternative and using a colorizer to fake varying amounts of rgb and control those channels. This seems stable so far, but a long and clunky way of doing the job when the channels actors could be more reliable.

Because I'm using a Lanbox LCE I can't use MIDI (especially as the box only has ethernet in, and LCedit+ doesn't recognize MIDI that I can see). Uploading the firmware helps for a while, but I can't understand why the crashes get increasingly frequent, especially when changing between scenes, and produce different random crash characters on the lanbox screen. There may be some answers in the Lanbox talk archive but the search facility of that makes me want to cry even more tha the Lanbox manual. Using Isadora actors that are easy to programme appeals much more that LCedit+.

The RGB actor solution is okay, but I would like to know if anyone else has more success with channels - and with which build of Isadora?

fubbi
Novice

Jul 5, 2008, 5:10 AM

Post #6 of 6 (354 views)
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Re: [JoeST] LanBox and light control [In reply to]	Can't Post

hey

that thing shouldn't be crashing. did you talk to lanbox about it?

I use the LCX so I have MIDI, but I used it like you before and have had it on tour under considerable stress with the lanbox RGB actor and some heavy video action. I never used the channel actors really.

have you done tests with increasing amounts of channel messages to see if it overloads and crashes?

Also, what kind of fixtures have you saved to the box from LCedit? Is it the actual fixtures you have or are you using generic ones?

fub

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