Support for Animated Lighting AC Controllers?

[markbowlby]

Hello

I am new to xLights and just getting started here. I will have many questions to come. First one is whether anyone has had success developing programs for an older AC power controller from Animated Lighting driven by Jolt Lighting DMX Controller from Lumiblox. To date I have been running canned lighting programs sourced from Animated Lighting and am interested in creating my own. Let me know if anyone has done this before. Thanks.

Marlk

[jnealand]

I do not know the answer to your question, but I can say this.  DMX is supported and used by lots of folks.  I use a couple of DMX channels just to turn on a couple of static things, like a spotlight on my nativity.  I know there are folks on here that used to own animated lighting controllers, but I do not know of anyone currently using them.  It is a big group so we will see who knows.

[K-State Fan]

I do not know anything about the controllers you listed but I use xLights to program 4 LOR controllers.

[needbrew]

I once used Animated lighting controllers and the animation Director software to do AC lights shows.  I tried many different ways to bring that into the pixel realm, but in the end ended up just selling off all the Animated lighting gear and buying falcon controllers and using FPP.  Was the best thing I ever did.

[markbowlby]

Pixels are somewhere in the distant future for me right now while I learn the basics of AC control. The AL controller is geared for that and I would like to exhaust options before popping for new gear. The current control box is a DMX Commander linked by Ethernet to the AL box. I'm wondering if there is an equivalent DMX output option from xLights that I could try and play with, either by programming an SD card for the Commander, running through the Commander via Ethernet from my Mac or bypassing the Commander completely and running directly from the laptop to the AL box. If these sound like rookie dreams and questions it's because they are, I am new to all this. Thanks,

[Gilrock]

xLights can output a few different DMX protocols but it requires a device connected to the computer that can output the DMX.  For instance I use an Entec OpenDMX which connects to a USB port on the PC and I control a Skull that runs off DMX.  I've also used E1.31 output to a Falcon board which has DMX outputs to control the same device.