I have been playing around with my Denon gear with the amazing SoundSwitch integration.
One caveat though is the use of one or more lasers during a show. Out of the box you can only use attribute cues, so in reality it seemed like the laser was doing it’s own thing completely separated from the programmed lightshow. Colors don’t match, as well as energy, strobe, etc.
For the last few months I’ve been working on a custom integration using ArtNET, a Raspberry PI, a bit of Python, and more, and I thought of showing you guys.
The video doesn’t go in-depth, I just wanted to check whether I should take the effort to share more details, a tutorial or whatever. Just let me know what you think!
Very interesting! You’re at a very advanced level! I mapped my 20-channel laser using SoundSwitch Mapper, entering all the DMX details for my 5W laser, but I couldn’t get any results from auto-scripting the track. The laser moves randomly with little central squiggles that make no sense. It takes a lot of patience and you need to understand how to generate patterns using lines that make sense.
Thanks for the video, it’s definitely a good starting point to work from.
I’m not sure if that’s the problem, but I’m sharing my experience.
In attributes you can select a specific pattern, for example, and following your laser’s manual it could be channel 6 and another.
In the values 0-255 you probably have, for example, one that’s a tunnel, and on channel 5 a vertical speed.
Adjust those or whatever you want to see the tunnel going up and down at the speeds you like.
Then you leave the other channels at 0. The expected thing is that when it reaches that attribute, the song will make a tunnel going up and down at the speed you set.
Remember that there are channels that activate auto mode, so when it remaches that attribute it goes into auto mode.
I don’t know if I’ve explained this correctly, but in short it’s about assigning what you want it to do in each attribute, for example 1 a tunnel, 2 a moving line, 3 a drawing, 4 a wave…
Hi, I’ve been using SW for quite some time now, and my interaction with lasers is becoming more and more extensive.
I mainly use lasers from U-King. I know they’re not the most powerful, but they’re good enough for playing around.
I have a 3-watt Laser that I use as a moving head.
Statically, it follows the colors used in the show, and I can also embed the internal show images as cues.
But my absolute favorite is the new ZQ02622.
A real laser moving head.
I’m currently in the process of enriching my show with it. 3-watt full RGB laser and gimmicks.
Please remember that using a laser involves a lot of effort.
It is important that you know what DMX is and what it does.
It is also good if you are familiar with and understand the fixture manager.
This is the only way to integrate lasers effectively for automatic functions and timecode streams.
My lasers have 27 channels and more. You need to know which one does what and when.
You can use a stationary laser with the right channels to follow the colors or the direction commands of the moving heads. That works. In addition, you can select the preconfigured show elements individually and control them via Cut Element. That works too.
I’m trying to make a video of my test setup to show what works and what doesn’t.
best René PS: Look for RF in the Fixture Manager or SW. Those are my public designs.
Awesome, I have recently purchased Soundswitch and control one along with a Chauvet gigbar move plus. After banging my gead trying to find the tight fixture for it, I found one that utilises all components.
I would love to see a more explanatory video on control of the laser.
I hate the way that Soundswitch interacts with lasers. My moving heads use shutter not on off, so it’s impossible to switch them off whilst having just lasers running (can’t activate blackout manually as that’s locked away by Soundswitch).
Freestyler is miles easier to gain full control of your fixtures, a few little tweaks would make Soundswitch so much better.
SSW certainly has much more potential and I wish more dev resources would be allocated to the team to bring more features, but first and foremost, QoL improvements to the scripting part.
Since the beginning of my project, I put a strict focus on RGB fixtures and pixel-mapped chases, while leaving away ‘complex’ fixtures (movers, lasers). In theory, my Skarmask alone has 264 channels, which would be a monstrosity to script as a single fixture, so I broke it down into different sections and treat them as individual sub-fixtures. This works reasonably well to script.
No matter the limitations, the performing part Engine Lighting, especially with the C1, still remains unrivaled.
I fully agree. Imagine if they only would change the .ssfile file format from proprietary to an open format such as JSON. We would be able to generate our own autoscripts, our own fully customizable presets, and way more.
But who knows, they might be working on a SoundSwitch 3 with all these new features. One can dream can’t we?
Please note that the SS software is intended for use in all areas, including professional applications. Professional moving heads use an R7 light source that shines continuously, just like a laser, and cannot be dimmed! This means that the shutter must be used for dimming. This is correct. Please remember that LED technology is dimmable, but unfortunately suffers from limited light output. Powerful systems are rare and expensive.
I cannot understand why the blackout does not work for you. For me, all systems are sent to the cutoff as soon as I use the blackout (including lasers and everything else). You may have another problem of a global nature, such as a DMX address via divorces or similar.
Personally, I think it’s a shame that there is still no standardisation in laser control. Every manufacturer tries to help, but you quickly realise that you need to rebuild everything. Some laser units can only be controlled via a colour wheel, while others can be addressed directly with RGB colours. Some laser fixtures can be moved up, down, left and right. All other features can only be controlled via cue points. But what can I say, there are also other fixtures that cannot utilise their full capacity. Because apparently things like prisms, focus, and all the other things that fixtures can do are not natively supported. That’s a shame because a lot of possibilities are lost here.
Perhaps a Soundswitch engineer could send us a light.
With the Fixture Manager, we can work around many problems or shortcomings, but unfortunately not all of them.
Using Freestyler (free piece of software), it’s dead easy to turn the fixtures on and off; you simply turn the fixtures off you don’t want on, open the shutter of the ones you do. This means you can have the lasers running solo, switch off and turn the moving heads on, switch them off and have your Darby running etc. it looks miles better. Each fixture should have an individual blackout as well as the group blackout when you programme scenes.
