I am trying to set up my Yuer Atomic LED Strobe in Beam. I’ve created a fixture profile file using your online editor fine. Where I’m having the issue is setting up the tags in Beam itself.
Simply put I have my main fixture tagged as ‘Master’, each row in a cell tagged with ‘Rows’ and each pixel in a sub-cell tagged ‘Pixels.
I can trigger each pixel fine using the tag 'Pixels’. But what I would like to do is to be able to trigger each row by just sending the note for the row as a group.
I can see the work around, by tagging each cell with its corresponding row, and having them all be triggered by the same note. But if I do that, I’m unsure of the purpose of tagging the row is, if not to apply the same command to everything contained in the sub-cell.
Great to see that the online editor worked out for you!
You bring up a good perspective on the behavior of cells and their sub-cells. The control values of the parent cell are indeed not forwarded to the sub-cells.
The main reason why is that we didn’t add cells with the goal of making control more convenient. Instead, we saw that some fixtures have multiple levels of control - like a sunstrip with multiple individual spots but one ‘global’ parameter. Or even more nesting where fixtures have sections a bunch of LEDs and separate strobe parameters. The cells structure allows you to target these ‘parts’ of a fixture in a quite fine-grained manner.
It is true that cells can also be useful for conveniently controlling their sub-cells. I’m not sure we considered that at some point and reverted it, or that it’s just something we haven’t looked into yet. Mayne @Luka remembers. I think it’s worth exploring this a bit, because I can see how this is powerful. Although you might want to turn it off in some cases too.
For now, I consider tagging each cell with the same note the correct approach. A bit of a hassle, but hopefully this is not too much of a pain for you to setup!
I assume you already found out that the .sbp file is just JSON with a different extension - so yes, with a bit of scripting it should be fairly straight-forward to make the change. An LLM might also know how to handle it!
Yes, done the mass tagging now. Not too much bother, and it has the desired effect. However, I’m having a strange issue now.
I have tags the pixels in each row, so all the pixels in one row are labelled with the same note. When creating a midi clip. Playing the rote activates the row of pixels as desired. However, if I use the LFO effect, it cycles the LFO through all the pixels one at a time as if they were all labelled with different notes, if that makes sense?
Yes, the ‘spread’ parameter of the LFO doesn’t relate to the note numbers. It spreads over the individual fixtures and cells regardless of the note numbers.
The note numbers (tags as well, btw) are only relevant for Instruments and don’t exists anymore after ‘leaving the Instrument’.
You can make all pixels turn on at the same time by turning down the ‘spread’ parameter. If you want to apply an LFO to two rows of pixels, you can experiment with using an Instrument Rack and two LFOs and putting them out-of-phase.
Besides that, thanks for sharing these situations you’ve encountered while working with a fixture with cells, wanting to address groups of cells as “one”, both when working with notes or LFO’s Spread parameter.
The shortcomings around this especially become apparent when you have multiple fixtures with cells, but you want to treat them as “one”, as if they were using a simpler DMX mode that doesn’t have dedicated channels for every cell. On the list of things to be improved.
