Creating a fixture profile for an unknown fixture

[thedundiesva]

Hey guys,

How would I create a profile for 2 generic spots (they’re not any specific brand that I can tell) but I’d still like to use them in our light show.

-Danny

[Luka]

Hi Danny,

To create a fixture profile you need to know the fixture channels. Finding this out without knowing the manufacturer & model can be tricky. There is not really such a thing as a standard “Generic Spot” channel configuration in the same way as there is a 3-channel “Generic RGB” or 1-channel “Generic Dimmer”.

I would suggest trying one of the following:

• Reverse image search on Google and Aliexpress (common source of no-name fixtures). If you share the fixture photos from multiple angles here we can maybe help identifying.
• See if you can find out channel counts of fixture’s DMX modes by navigating through its menu.
• Check how these fixtures were used before you started using Beam (e.g. a lighting console or another software) and see if you can get fixture channel info from there.

[thedundiesva]

Hey Luka!
I’ve uploaded the images of the spots. From the menu it shows it has 14 channels but there’s nothing that tells me what brand they are from the menu. Thanks again!

[Luka]

Thanks for sharing this! Looks exactly like this fixture on AliExpress, but I cannot find its manual.

It is also similar to this Shehds fixture, which has a 14-channel mode. Please try this fixture profile and see what happens:
Shehds 6-Prism LED Spot 100W.sbf (2.7 KB)

[Luka]

Hey @thedundiesva, in our e-mail correspondence you reported:

I’m having trouble getting the “Shehds” spots to put out any light. I have control of the panning and tilt so something’s working but I can’t seem to control the light output.

As figuring out channels of an unknown fixture is a challenge that more people might come across at some point, I thought I’d reply here.

Being able to control pan and tilt is a good start and means there is a chance your fixture uses the same DMX channel configuration as the one I linked in my previous post, but it could also be that they are only matching partially.

Let’s try to find out what each channel does by activating each of the 14 channels and see what happens:

1. Start by opening Beam’s Monitor in an external window (Window > External Monitor).

2. In the Fixture Patch, add 14 Generic Dimmer fixtures. These are 1-channel fixtures that only control intensity, so every fixture will represent one channel of your fixture.

3. Set a fixture/channel to 255 by selecting it and pressing “Test”. Do this for one channel individually at a time and see if any of them make the light output change:

   • if yes you’ve found the Dimmer channel
   • if not, it means the Shutter/Strobe channel (and possibly another channel) likely also needs to be set to some non-0 value to allow light to pass through; try setting all channels to 255 and see if that makes the fixture light up and then try to turn off channels one by one to see until you only have the channels that need to be set to 255 left; note: it is unclear what the Reset channel of this fixture does when set to 255, it might result in unexpected behavior

   You should be able to at least find Dimmer, Strobe, Pan and Tilt this way. Rename fixtures as you determine what each channel does.

   

4. Determining the functions of the rest of the channels might be hard only by setting their values to 255 and you might want to try gradually increasing them from 0 to 255. To do that:

   • assign a tag to all the 14 fixtures
   • in Live, add a Generic device and select the tag you just created
   • select 14x dim in the device’s parameters - each of these will control one of the 14 fixtures/channels
   

If you find out what each channel does, please let us know and we can help you set up a fixture profile for your fixture.