- Posted on
Sat Dec 24, 2022 2:51 pm
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LewK
offline
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- Posts: 5
- Joined: Apr 12, 2018
- Location: Culver, IN, USA
You may not be interested since it sounds like you have it working pretty well at this point, but I wrote an extension that lets you issue DMX commands right from Indigo using a USB to DMX box.
When I designed my house I wanted to only use LED strip lighting and 10 Insteon 8 buttons Keypad Lincs, 4 Insteon 6 button Keybad Lincs, 11 Insteon SwitchLin Dimmers, and 12 Insteon SwitchLinc Relays. None of the Insteon devices have any load hooked up to them, they just send commands to my Mac mini running Indigo and act upon those commands by sending a DMX control string thru the EntTec DMXUSB Pro to 4 daisy chained DMX controllers. It actually has worked out quite well. The only issue that I have rarely run into is the Insteon commands getting flakey if I accidentally hit two buttons on one of the multi-button controllers or turn something on and off to fast - especially if there is a delay built into at all. Two things that have helped the system be reliable are having a whole house surge suppressor and having all the controllers on one AC circuit along with the USB interface to send the AC and wireless commands.
With my extension a scene wouldn't be any different than just turning a single LED strip on or off as it would just involve setting the dimmer values for each fixture/instrument in the DMX control string and then sending that string to the DMX Pro box. The only drawback is that transitions would be abrupt since there is no fade between two different intensity levels. But since I haven't been interested in having the lights fade at a certain rate from off to on a certain level, that hasn't been an issue for me.
If you have any interest, send me a direct message and I'll email you the files for the extension and instructions.
LewK