My first hand made fixture

Welcome to BlinderKitten !

On this page, we'll see how you can create a basic fixture, patch it and test it !

Channel family and type

First of all, you need a channel family and a channel type. To create them, you can go in the channel config window and click on the + button on the top right of it.

This will create a new channel family called "Channel family"

Lets rename it "Dimmers" by double clicking on it and entering its new name.

Now that you have your new channel family, you can click on it, it will show its content in the inspector window.

You can see a container named "Channel types", bbyy clicking the + button on the top right of it, you can now create your new channel type, and rename it "Intensity"

While wer're here, lets select it and change its mode to HTP, and check the react to dimmer checkbox.

Fixture type

Blinder kitten now knows that you can control some dimmer channels, let's create a new fixture type.

To create it, go in the fixture type window and click on the + button

You can now change the fixture type name to "Generic dimmer"

When clicking it, the inspector show you the content of your fixture type.

Actually you have no channel, let's add one by clicking on the + button in the channels list

You can now select the channel type "Intensity" by clicking the little target "channel type"

Please also check the killed by swop checkbox, as we want our dimmer going to black when an swop is pressed

Interfaces to the real world

As we want to patch our fixtures, we'll need a dmx universe to output.

Let's create an interface, as usual, window interface, click the + button, and selec DMX

You can now select your DMX node type if you have one or use artnet and an external sofware if you want to do some tests

Let's patch some fixtures

To create a single fixture, you can go to the fixture window and click on the plus button.

By selecting it, you'll be able to chose the fixture type of your fixture, and add some patchs to it.

This is the laborious way to create a fixture, you can also click on the assistant button in the input panel. you can now see in the inspector a container labeled "patch helper"

From here you can choose a fixture type, a start address, an interface and an amount, the assistant will patch desired fixtures for you.

Let's try it by patching 9 dimmers with a start id of 2

You should now have 10 dimmers, with IDs from 1 to 10.

Note that all your fixtures have an ID, this ID is unique for every fixture and will be used to give them commands. Choose it wisely !

Congratulations, you now have some fixtures in you show.