controlling the intensity of a light via OSC

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Fausto
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controlling the intensity of a light via OSC

Post by Fausto »

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.
admin
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Post by admin »

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.
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Post by admin »

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.
Fausto
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Post by Fausto »

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.
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Post by admin »

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.
Fausto
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Post by Fausto »

Thank you so much for these additional informations.
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