Lindberg 3-Axis Skull in Xlights

[KenKol]

I have two Lindberg 3-Axis servo driven animatronic skulls that I want to incorporate into Xlights, but I am having issues.

I can add the DMX Skull in the layout , but trying to get them to act as singing faces is not happening.

I was hoping that these could operate such as the singing coro faces that I already have and use, but it is not letting me define the "faces" in the layout, the field is greyed out.

Am I missing something here? Or is this something better handled by a custom model comprised of individual servos?

[Gilrock]

As far as I know the only option is the feature I added where you use the "Servo" effect which can be linked to a timing track that has been broken down into singing faces phonemes.  It just uses hard-coded servo percentages for each phoneme and when I tested I tied it to the Jaw channel of a Skulltronix skull.

[KenKol]

OK, I got it, I think. When you click on DMX to add (Selections include Floodlight, Area Flood Moving Heads, Servo and skull), I shouldn't select Skull, but rather select the individual servos? The Lindberg Skull has five servos total, Jaw, Eyes, Head rotate, Head nod and Head Tilt. Adding the servo addressed to the Jaw I should be able to address values for the phenoms?

Effects like random or synchronized head movements and eye movements shouldn't be that difficult but it was the actual mouthing of the words I wanted to get going.

[Gilrock]

No there is no reason to split the servos up into multiple models.  If you just try out the Servo effect you will see you select which servo the effect controls right there in the settings per effect.

[KenKol]

FANTASTIC Gil! Works like a charm! my only remaining question is why the model preview has the skull tipped and, well for lack of a better term, not straight. Is there something in the layout with positioning I need to fix?

[Gilrock]

In the model settings every servo has parameters that can tune the model preview positioning to match reality.  I forget exact names but its something like orientation and range of motion.  One should set the starting angle the other defines how many total degrees it moves.  Then its position is defined by the values being loaded in those servo channels. 

[KenKol]

I have been messing with this non stop for days now and I cannot seem to get the hang of what I should be doing for setup. When I change something it seems to have an adverse effect on something else.

2 questions (maybe more, but whos counting)

1 setup within xlights. I have some success in doing this, but it acts weird. In the setup, I add a dmx skull, I select the checkboxes next to the movements I mentioned about. With "16 Bit" selected, the layout in xlights is strange and never changes. It does not matter if I change the total amount of channels or not nor does it change anything when I change the channel for each movement. It lists them successfully in the "strand" view in xlights as Nodes 1-7, power then,Jaw. It then puts Jaw Fine after that and all the movements are held in Jaw fine. It does that for all the movements and, as I said, it does not change when I change things in layout. This dovetails into the next issue;

2 Using a Peace DC servo board. I think I am on the right train of thought when I set it up using channels 10 thru 15 to plug the servos into and that follows inline with the node layout when expanding the strands.

I get movement, but without the start channels adjusting when I change them in Layout and the "Fine" movements taking up every other channel, I do not know how to make it work

Skull 4 is the layout where I called out channels 10, 12, and 13 to be three separate channels

Skull 2 is the Model

Skull 1 is the strand layout in sequence editor.

As it shows and is my confusion is even though I addressed the specific channels in layout, it does/does not do the things one would expect. First, it does not place them on the correct node and, second, it adds the fine for the movements.

What is happening on the peace boards is exactly how they are supposed to be acting. it takes the nodes as they are listed and playing them on the respective outputs.

Should i, in xlights, choose servo in the layout and forgo the actual skull model? That still does not help with the fine movements at all. it still skips nodes.

As far as I see, the peace boards "replace pixels" meaning if my start channel for the peace board is 24991, then the servos should be pixels 24500, 24501, 24502, 24503, 24504 and 24505. Given that train of thought, I Should be able to call out the separate channels in Xlights; 10,11,12,13,14 and 15 for whichever movements i want.

What is everyone's opinion on how this should be done?

[keithsw1111]

Don?t forget to render all after any change on the layout tab.

[KenKol]

Thanks, that was my first go to as well. either way, when I save, it re-renders everything at any rate, so it should be good so to say. I realize the 16 bit needs to be there in the layout for fine movement to happen and I can program all the movements in xlights. The problem comes in how the peace dc servo boards translate the pixel information they receive and/or how xlights presents the data.

I would like to think that when I check off my desired skull movements, it would drop the unchecked ones IE, As I said above, I have 5 servos; Jaw, Nod, Tilt, Pan and eyes left and right. When I check those movements in the layout and not check the others, I should be able to choose those movements when placing a servo effect in the sequence and not have the others listed either. It does effect the pick list when you lessen the number of channels from 26 to 15. Of course, when you do that, it keeps all the movements and just lists the first 15, kinda screws with the next board if I am daisy chaining two boards.

It's almost as if the initial setup box for the skull doesn't really do anything for the sequence editing but narrows the list in the layout for each movement selection. The channel number selection for each movement does not seem to effect anything either. I can change it all day long (and render all) and the node layout (what the peace board actually looks for) still remains the same even with the unselected movements. That amounts to skipped channels and no movement.

I also tried to use individual servos and not the skull layout. If I were to set the start channel to 24500 (24991 is the first channel in a peace board, 9 dc channels - 24991+9=24500 for servo 1 output....I think). Alternatively, I tried to use the start channel as 24991 and change the channel to 10, no joy on that either.

I love this function and I want to use it for haloween for two of these skulls and I want to use the faces breakdowns in Xlights, but this is a wrinkle I cannot seem to figure out.\

Forgot to mention, I cannot seem to do anything with the values min and max or rotation to effect the servo at all.

[keithsw1111]

Yeah I can?t really help. Jerry and Gil seem closest to this

[Gilrock]

Well I have no idea how the Peace DC servo board works.  I've ordered one of the new Peace Servo boards but not sure if it will ever be delivered.  I can't really tell what your doing or follow that long description.  You need to isolate things down to a simple test case and show some actual screenshots or share a sequence.  You really should never be seeing the "Fine" channels you should be dropping a Servo effect at the model level and just selecting the desired servo.  If you are dropping effects down on those strand/node channels that's not how to do it.  The servos listed come from the Node names.  I try to populate them based on what you select but maybe they got out of sync.  Just open the node names in properties and see what's there.  The minus sign in front of the names is there to prevent it from showing up in the list of servos.

Min and Max are the limits for the actual servo values and rotation is only for rotation of what's displayed in xlights it has no bearing on the operation of the servo.

[KenKol]

Gil, thanks for helping me on this. I will try to simplify things and detail my pictures:

I started from square one, I added a new dmx skull model and called out what I had as far as servos go (Ken SKull 1.JPG and Ken Skull 2.jpg). I selected just the Jaw, Pan, Tilt, Nod and Eye Left and right. I also selected 16 bit. In the layout, I called out the channel numbers I wanted. In my case and the case of the peace boards (Currently have an e-mail out to david to confirm) I selected channels 10 thru 14 for each of the movements.

When I am in the sequence screen and add the Skull as a display element and expand it to see the strand and then expand it to see the actual nodes (Ken Skull 3.jpg) I can see the Jaw and Jaw fine as well as all the extra nodes I didn't select like eyes up and down, color and brightness and the extra nodes. Perhaps, as you mentioned, a sync issue.

Next, I dropped a dmx servo effect on the model, not the strand or the nodes, and it places the movement in the -Jaw Fine node (Ken Skull 4.jpg).

When I call out the base channel when selecting which movement gets the effect, I still see all the unchecked movements as well (Ken Skull 5.jpg)

If I place a movement on a separate layer to get, tilt in this case, it places the movement, again, in the fine node (Ken Skull 6.jpg).

What I can confirm is that the peace boards are in fact treating this line of nodes as direct outputs. What i mean is that, in this case here, the -Jaw Fine is actually node two and the tilt is actually on node six. Being as the peace boards have only 6 servo outputs, this effectively skips every other node as in the sequence when the nodes are broken open.

I can "fool" it into making the movements work for all servos, but definitely not intuitive. What I did do to make them all work is make my start channel as 24999. This puts the first actual movement on peace board output 10, The movements were place as follows:

Jaw Movement - effect as Base Channel "Jaw" 16 bit checked
Nod Movement - effect as base channel "pan" 16 bit UNchecked
Pan Movement - effect as base channel "Pan" 16 bit checked
Eyes left and right - effect as base channel "Tilt" 16 bit UNchecked
Tilt movement - effect as base channel "Tilt" 16 bit checked

doing it that way, the servos all moved. Caveat to that method is the rotation and movement should not be the same for the different servos

[Gilrock]

So you still have 26 channels assigned to the model according to that end channel.  After you uncheck the boxes you also need to open the property grid for every servo and make sure its relative start channel is correct.  If you didn't touch them then they still have the same original offsets which is why you are seeing what you do when you called it "cheating".  The defaults were setup for a SkullTronix so when you have other devices you need to do some manual configuring.

[KenKol]

When I change it to 15 channels to match the board, I lose the skull model. Not a huge deal I guess. (Ken Skull 1A.jpg). In the sequence, the node breakout just shortens the list. It doesn't lose any of the movements, so, again, not a huge deal. (Ken Skull 2a.jpg)

The property grid for each servo, if you are referring to setting the "channel" on each movement servo, I am doing that (Ken Skull 1A.jpg) That should correspond to the "common properties" and, whether or not I select "Indiv Start Chans" it should still follow along with "PanServo" calling out Channel 11 and the start channel of the skull as a whole starting at 24991 culminating in channel 11 = 25001 = "Eye LR" which is not right.

The peace boards, as far as I can tell, will see it as:
"Jaw" = node 1 = 24491
"-Jaw Fine" = Node 2 = 24492
"Pan" = Node 3 = 24493
"-Pan Fine" = Node 4 = 24494

And so on until you fill the selected amount of channels, 15 in this case, then chain another servo board to have two skulls that will talk to each other. That board will have to start at 25006 or something else which I was using the 26 channels being as that was the only way I could get the skull to show up in the layout.

I hope I am getting the information across correctly although I may be missing something. I currently have this set up in my garage as a temporary thing to do some testing, so I can still try things out and get back to you promptly.

[Gilrock]

I still think you have the channels setup wrong.  Those channel numbers for each servo are relative to the start channel so why do you have 11 for the Pan servo when I believe its the 2nd servo which would start at channel 3 on the model.  The model is not drawing because you typed in 15 channels but you have one or more servos defined at channel offsets higher than 15.