AlphaTheta say their library provider will add any new fixture so there’s no need to be able to define your own. But actually they don’t necessarily add a fixture in a way that lets you use all of its features. For instance, I have a couple of beamZ BS960 lights:
The standard library fixture definition for this was absolutely rubbish, it completely wasted lots of its capabilities. In 39 channel mode on this device I can have RGB control of 8 different sections of its LED array, it also has a strobe bar and some handy ancillary channels too.
Having building block device definitions for each of a built in devices capabilities would be really handy. This currently isn’t provided, but you can create it by finding devices that give you the building block elements you need. Also remember that you have 9 DMX Direct Control setups you can adjust in performance mode which you can use to set the on/off level directly for specific DMX channels. If your device has channels that do something special and which scene editing doesn’t easily let you control, could you use a DMX Direct Control instead to set it or toggle it live?
In my case for the beamZ BS960 light above, I didn’t use the library fixture definition and instead I used a Direct DMX Control to set its master brightness channel (its a very bright light, I often want that set to a < 255 value anyway and its venue dependant so useful for me to be able to tweak that setting in Direct DMX Control).
For the 8 LED matrix squares I found a 3 channel RGB fixture and used it 8 times across those 24 channels of the 39 in total, assigning them as Par1-4 and Par 4-1 for the top and bottom rows (which works really well – looks fantastic in use!).
For the strobe bar I assigned a single channel strobe device 8 times to its 8 DMX channels for its 8 sections.
Here’s my assignment, its set to start address 11 but I didn’t need to control all 39 of its channels (and its first master brightness channel is in a DMX Direct control):
One fixture, utilising the Par and Strobe programming bypassing the poor library definition that would have only let me use it as one Par OR strobe fixture!!
Example generic fixtures
3 channel RGB color
64B LED Pro(1)
1 channel strobe
Ultra Strobe (1channel mode, 1cs)
