Original LXSeries Forum

I would like to send OSC messages to LxBeams from an external software (but on the same machine), to control the intensity of the fixtures in my lighting plot.

I am not sure what message I should send, and in which range?

i.e. to control channel 1:
/lxbeams/ch1/ and then an integer between 0 and 255 ?
or
/1/ and then a float ranging(0-1) ?
or
....?

I have tried to look through the forum, and looked up the LxBeams online documentation, but couldn't find an answer to this, and got a bit confused...

I apologise if this is a newbie question, I have just started to get my head around OSC and would like to see if LxBeams can receive OSC from an external software (like Processing etc..)

I use LxBeams a lot, but never tried to interface it with anything else other than LxConsole.

The OSC documentation is on the preferences page of the online help.

To control a channel, send the address pattern /lxchannel/nn with a floating point argument 0.0-1.0 (where nn is the channel number).

Subchannels are controlled by the channel dot subchannel. To control channel 7 red, send /lxchannel/7.23. You'll find the subchannel numbers in the device addresses tab of the key entry sheet.

Also, if you are interested in experimenting with OSC and Processing, there's the open source LXforProcessing library which includes OSC:

https://github.com/claudeheintz/LXforProcessing

Of course, there are a number of OSC libraries for Processing. LXforProcessing (LX4P) has support for Art-Net and sACN as well.

Thanks Claude for pointing me in the right direction.
I couldn't find the documentation on the online help.

It works very well, and it worked straight away.
I am experiencing a little bit of lag when playing "heavy cues", especially when the Model is open, but otherwise it works like a charm.

and yes I am familiar with your Processing library and have used it a lot to experiment with LED strips and for other prototypes / personal research / tests.

I really admire your work, and your coding skills are really impressive.

Thanks again for your help.

The documentation is on the Preferences page in the Help (Help->LXBeams Help). From the help's main index page, click "Menus", then click "Preferences" and scroll down to "OSC DMX".

When you have a lot of channels to change at once, sending individual /LXChannel/ messages can indeed cause a lag. There is a way to send all the non-zero levels in a single message using an OSC binary blob. The format is described in the help. This is what LXConsole uses when sending channel levels to LXBeams.

Thank you so much for these additional informations.