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Color wheel behaviour

Posted: 04 Mar 2013, 10:13
by Civette
Hi,

I'm currently learning FS and testing a Showtec indigo 150. In itself it is running fine but I have a little issue.

I made a sequence with the color wheel. There are 10 colors and sequence goes from 1 to 10 again and again and again.

Issue is that after step 10 it comes back to step one but wheel instead of going one color further ( back to one thus), comes back 9 colors reverse. Result is the same but you see all colors going back.

I bet the issue is the fixture. Would you have an idea or a piece of advice ?

Thank you,

Re: Color wheel behaviour

Posted: 04 Mar 2013, 14:18
by Hambone
It's most likely the fixture - most fixtures that have a color wheel will exhibit this behavior, as it has no way to tell that you want to "wrap around" strictly based on the DMX value you send. You might want to double-check your sequence and make sure the steps are set to snap instead of fade - it's possible that that could fix it (i.e. if you're fading from DMX 255 in step 10 to DMX 0 in step 1, the wheel will spin backward), but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Another alternative would be to use the rainbow effect in the fixture instead. If you're running it in 12-channel (advanced) mode, set channel 6 to a value between 150-255 and the color wheel will rotate continuously. The higher the number, the faster it spins. If you're running in 9-channel (basic) mode, set channel 3 to a value between 150-255 for the same effect. The beauty of this is that you now have the cycle effect you're looking for, and only need a one-step sequence to achieve it :)

Hope that helps!

Re: Color wheel behaviour

Posted: 04 Mar 2013, 14:30
by Civette
Rainbow might be a quite good workaround. I'll test it

I also suspected the fixture. Ideally device should make a "lazy" calculation : what is the smaller and fastest rotation to do in order to have the selected fixture ? Easy to imagine, harder to implement.

Re: Color wheel behaviour

Posted: 04 Mar 2013, 23:16
by Kings
I guess is that the colour wheel will only ever turn 360 degrees. Whatever drives it has a limited degree of movement and wont allow it to spin continuously. That's why it will always reverse back through all the colours to get to the first one. I have the same problem with my Dynamos. My advice is to create a sequence like this (say the colour wheel has 5 colours): c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c4 c3 c2...so that you never see the wheel scroll through more than one colour.

Re: Color wheel behaviour

Posted: 05 Mar 2013, 07:10
by Civette
Hi Kings,

Actually color wheel has a 360° of liberty as the "rainbow" effect makes it turn clockwise endlessly, without coming back.

Thank you,

Re: Color wheel behaviour

Posted: 05 Mar 2013, 07:36
by Kings
Ahh..so it is just being 'lazy'!