Taking the leap from LOR to xLights...Guidance Please!

[tonyski]

Greetings all. Looks like 2018 will be the year that I take the leap from LOR S4 to xLights. I'm excited and nervous and would like to avoid the pitfalls that many of you have experienced. Maybe this could become a repository of "Best Practices" and "Definitely Don'ts"

If someone is aware of a current guide to the conversion please point me that way. I have spent some time looking but the internet is a vast place to look. Some of the information that I have found seems dated.

Briefly, my display has:

12 LOR CCRs (I will be replacing them with pixel strips and a falcon controller)
24 LOR 50 watt RGB Floods
17 dmx 36 watt RGB Floods
RGB pixel props with Falcon and SanDevice controllers
roughly 60 LOR 1602 controllers

I currently have multiple networks

REG - majority the North side of m driveway
AUX A / AUX B/ AUX C - 12 CCRs
AUX D - majority of the south side of my driveway (includes an idmx1000 for the dmx floods)
AUX E - 24 LOR floods
AUX F - 42 Channels for some problematic leaping arches
E1.31

I know I could combine some of this but I like to be able to isolate parts for physical layout and fault isolation

I intend to use the serial outputs from 2 Falcon Controllers to send the data to the display

On the north side of the yard, REG/AUX F from one serial port, AUX E from one serial port and half of AUX D from the third serial port. (F16V2)

On the south side remaining half of AUX D from one serial port , and the true dmx floods from the second.(F16V3)

I feel that the E1.31 part of my display (created with pixel editor) should be an easy switch, bit the rest of my AC channels and 12 CCR Superstar Tree seem a bit more daunting.

My initial question is what do I need to do to my existing sequences in LOR to prepare them for the conversion?

I have read that they need to be in perfect order. Unit ID 01 Channels 1-16, Unit ID 02 Channels 1-16 and so on. Is that really necessary? That would be extraordinarily difficult.

Do I assign dmx universes and channels before I convert?

Do I have to start with Universe 1?

This should get me pointed in the right direction. Thanking all of you in this community in advance!

Happy New Year to all,

Tony

[Ebuechner]

First off welcome.

When I did my conversion from Lor I made a channel lineup that I imported into all of my Lor sequences to make sure that they all had identical Channel and model names and numbers.
Once that was done I sat down and made a mapping layout, then it was easy after that to do all the importing.
I think you would greatly benefit by joining the zoom meetings that we have on Wednesday nights to get help.
People are in that meeting room on most nights if you want to check in from time to time trying to get some help.

[Gilrock]

You only need a perfect channel match if you want to perform a conversion from an LMS file to xLights or if you wanted to import the data as a data layer.  Alternatively you can use the Import Effects feature and a dialog will allow you to map all your LOR channels to the xLights models/channels you've created in xLights.  Its really easy if you have mainly AC stuff. If you have RGB stuff I believe it takes longer because you gotta map every node and that is due to how LOR doesn't have the effects stored at a model level they are at the node level. That might not be true for the new version 5 but they probably broke the import capability in their new version.  Just make sure to save your import mapping before you hit OK so that you can later recall it for importing all your other sequences.