Madrix, Light o rama, pixels and universes

mborg10

Michael Borg
Joined
Dec 28, 2011
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claremont meadows
I have been looking more and more and Madrix and it looks like an awesome setup.
Of course the big thing is price. I got a quotetoday from stellascapes for the madrix dongle.
$375 for 1 universe - 170 pixels
$1250 for 16 unverse

I know this is a very basic question but a 30 led/m rgb pixel strip which is 5m long would have 150 pixels which means almost 1 universe per strip. That doesnt seem like very much.
If thats the case I don't think it $375 well spent. Possibly strips might not be the best choice as the pixels are too close together. Possibly 50 pixels per 5m would be better in a larger display ie matrix or mega tree.

Last year I ran my program from a showtime director with no pc attached. Can you still do that with Madrix or it has to be running live on the PC to work. From the tutorials I have watched it looks like you only place shortcuts in lightorama which have to refer to Madrix programming.

I printed off Fast Eddys diagram for e1.31, hyper DMX and DMX layouts which is a great assistance to help me piece together this puzzle.
 

David_AVD

Grandpa Elf
Community project designer
Generous elf
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Victoria Point (Brisbane)
The 30 LEDs per metre strip is more often only 10 ICs per metre. This means that each IC controls a group of 3 LEDs, which in turn means there are one 50 groups (150 channels) per 5 metre length. You could fit three of those strips into one DMX universe.

There are other strips where each LED has it's own IC, either internal to the LED or next to it. Those strips use 3 times as many channels (450) given the same LED spacing, so uses the majority of one DMX universe by itself.

Hope that helps.
 

mborg10

Michael Borg
Joined
Dec 28, 2011
Messages
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Location
claremont meadows
Yeah that helps. Just reading thru the 101 manual which is teaching me a lot too. It's like being back at school again. I skim the reading part and just look at all the pretty pictures.
 

neilric99

Full time elf
Joined
May 20, 2010
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Irvine, the OC, CA
you will find Madrix will let you apply multiple dongles on the same system and let you build up the universes that way. so if you only need 1024 channels (340 pixels) then that will be only $700, so it becomes cost effective pretty quick to buy the 16 Universe version for $1250.


The beauty of Madrix is that you can drive it via your favorite sequencer via DMX/sACN/Artnet/midi/http and make it more standalone.


As you start looking you will see that Light Factory Personal edition can also drive matrix effects and is a cost effective solution with its 100+ Universe support for around $500. Not as easy to setup as Madrix though but just as powerful.





mborg10 said:
I have been looking more and more and Madrix and it looks like an awesome setup.
Of course the big thing is price. I got a quotetoday from stellascapes for the madrix dongle.
$375 for 1 universe - 170 pixels
$1250 for 16 unverse
 
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