Minitrees

[tuppetsdad]

Have 6 mini trees each with 8 single strings in following order
Red Top
Red Bottom
Green Top
Green Bottom
White Top
White Bottom
Blue top
Blue Bottom


Address continuous 97 to 104.


Tried to set up with a custom model rather than have 8 different models for each tree. Problem is you can only specify one colour for the string even with 8 Strand Node Names (Set to RED).
Tried also to use the States (no reference in manual Jerry 8) ) and Set numbers in state to address numbers 97-104 and selected the node for each of the 8 above, set colour for each node.


When I try in the sequencer only the RED colour works.


Any suggestions??


Thanks
8) 8) 8)

 

[Gilrock]

It would have been a lot better if you had built them as 4 channel RGBW trees. You didn't even put white in the right order for what we support. Any reason you can't flip those 2 channels? What does this physically look like?

 

[tuppetsdad]

Hi Gil

You can see a couple of them here. Top and bottom half of each tree have RGBW strings. So can switch separately.



No big deal to change the order to RGBW. Made these about 8 years ago which is why they are in that order.

Thanks

 

[Gilrock]

So I've actually been investigating possible improvements for RGBW. We do currently have the "4 channel RGBW" string type and using that in conjunction with setting individual start channels you can create a mega tree that only has 4 channels. I did this for someone else yesterday to demonstrate. In this picture you can see I created an 800 node tree that is only 4 channels. I'm showing the property window from Layout on the bottom and a snippet of the sequencer grid on top. To be able to see how the channels are activated I created a second single line single channel white model and named the 4 nodes. I assigned both models to the same set of 4 channels. So when I drop a color on the Tree model you can see what happens to the 4 channel outputs on the model below. Its a cool way to show what happens with the data. You can see if I drop white it only fires the white channel. I drop red, green, or blue and it fires that channel. If you drop a mixed color you will get multiple channels activated. So if you want red and blue you drop a color that is 255,0,255. I'm going to see if I can create or modify a model that will show the individual colors instead of mixing them into one node. Also notice that if you drop any color where red=green=blue i.e. a grayscale color it will only activate the white channel.

 

[tuppetsdad]

Thanks Gil

Now have three types of models to control the same outputs just to be able to see what is happening

MiniTree 1 is a model with 8 states



The others I have defined as you Suggested a line but with two RGBW nodes and a 16 string tree



Result you can see here


Was a nice exercise to better understand how XLights handles models

Not exactly matching the string physical position but easy to sequence

 

[Gilrock]

Yeah we were looking at this last night. Currently our 4 channel RGBW string type can't display white at the same time as any of the other colors. It was kind of a hack where if we detect a grayscale color we only write to the white channel and ignore the other 3. The problem is our current design uses 3 channel nodes. So even when you define a node as single color internally it's still a 3 color node but we only look at the data from the color you define. That works fine until you want a 4 channel node. We'll look into it so not sure if that will get improved or not. It's definitely one area where it's easier in LOR because they sequence at the channel level whereas we sequence to the model, strand, and node level.