I've had a Magic 260 only for a few days, and actually have never used DMX before this, but have a fairly strong technical background in electronics and programming. I have a number of questions about the Magic 260. As with most of the equipment we purchased, the instructions are not verbose.

I have four moving heads (2 DJSPOT250, 2 DJSPOT300), two COLORstrips, a Dynasty SCAN, two Followspot 400G, two DP-DMX20Ls, and two DP-415s. I have the 415s as switches running some gobo projectors and strobes while the 20Ls run some PAR lighting.

Here are some topics I could use help on:

(1) PRESETS -- Movement? Points?

My guess is that presets allow you to have some dynamic content in a SCENE. Because it seems DMX signals send out a continuous repeated status of all 512 channels, one would think a scene would have to be static.

The manual combines PRESET movements and PRESET points. I could get somewhere on the movements, but there is no information on the PRESET points. They seem magical because they imply that you can pick a point on the stage and have all your lighting go to that point. Any idea how the preset points work? I could not find it in the manual.


(2) PRESET Movement -- Offset & Radius

My guess is that the six preset movements only work with pan/tilt devices such as moving heads and scanners. I got them to work somewhat. My guess is that the section telling you how to edit offset point and radius help you move the figure-8 or circle movement on the stage. I can't get it to reliably work. First of all, the radius seems to be limited to about 45 units max. This seems limiting. Is there a way to increase it? I cannot reliably set the offset pan/tilt values because they are running/changing as I try to edit them. Am I doing something wrong?


(3) USB LINK Driver

I sent in a technical question on this, but thought I would post it here too. When I install the USB LINK driver (once plugging in the USB cable to my computer and 260, it makes my computer unstable. I cannot reboot with the driver installed. I have to load the last known good configuration under XP. The Magic260Save software does not recognize the 260 as being plugged in so I cannot move files at this point. I uninstalled and try to installed numerous times.

I know computer configurations are complex, but any ideas about what might be going wrong?

mike
duranevents.com