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patching.rst

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Patching fixtures

To make Starlet aware of a lighting fixture (in theatrical parlance, to "patch" a fixture), use patch-fixture! from module (starlet engine). You will need to import the fixture definition from the fixture library. For example, to patch a simple dimmer with DMX address 32 on universe 4:

(use-modules
  (starlet engine)
  (starlet fixture-library generic dimmer))

(patch-fixture! my-dimmer <generic-dimmer> 32 #:universe 4)

Universe numbering starts from zero (consistent with OLA's numbering), and channel numbering starts from 1.

After the above, the symbol my-dimmer will be bound to an object representing the dimmer:

scheme@(guile-user)> my-dimmer
$1 = #<<generic-dimmer> 7f9ee817f300>

Intelligent fixtures should go to their home positions immediately after being patched.

Note that you can give a fixture multiple names. For example, if the spotlight you use for a throne (throne-spot) is re-used to light a table:

(define table-spot throne-spot)

This leaves the door open for replacing table-spot with a separate fixture later on, if the re-usage doesn't work out as you expected. In that case, after rigging the new fixture, simply replace the above define call with a new call to patch-fixture!.

Lists of fixtures

Starlet fixture objects are just normal GOOPS objects. You can do normal Scheme-y things with them, such as making lists of them:

(define red-backlight
   (list backlight-red-usl
         backlight-red-usr
         backlight-red-dsl
         backlight-red-dsr))

Procedures such as at work with these lists in the same way that they work on individual fixtures:

(at red-backlight 100)

See basic-control.rst for more information about at.

Patching multiple fixtures at once

At this point, you might be tempted to create a standard file which defines all the fixtures in your venue, naming them dimmer1, dimmer2, dimmer3 and so on. This is fine, and certainly one way of using Starlet. However, there is no shortcut for patching multiple fixtures with systematically-related names like this. The reason for this is something highly technical related to top-level bindings introduced by macros in Guile modules - read here if you're interested.

Before you protest too much about this, keep in mind that you are supposed to use descriptive names for your fixture objects. When using Starlet, you shouldn't need to constantly look up fixture names (or worse, numbers) in a lighting plan. Instead, give your fixtures names which represent what they do, for example: balcony-front-warm, followspot or throne-spot.

What you can do, however, is to create a list of fixtures all at once. The individual fixtures in the list won't have their own names, so this is meant for situations where you mainly want to control the fixtures as a group. For example, to create eight dimmers with DMX addresses numbered 2, 4, 6...

scheme@(guile-user)> (patch-many! foh-warm <generic-dimmer> '(2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16))
scheme@(guile-user)> foh-warm
$1 = (#<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3dc00> #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3db80>
      #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3db00> #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3da80>
      #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3da40> #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3d9c0>
      #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3d940> #<<generic-dimmer> 7f6da7c3d8c0>)
scheme@(guile-user)> (at foh-warm 85)

To address a fixture individually from the list, you would need to use list-ref. This is a little clumsy, but as mentioned above should be a rare exception:

(at (list-ref foh-warm 2) 85)

Instead of explicitly specifying the list of addresses in patch-many!, you can use iota to generate the list of addresses. The following call has the same effect as the example above, except this time the dimmers are on universe 3 instead of 0:

(patch-many! foh-warm <generic-dimmer> (iota 8 2 2)
             #:universe 3)

Note that the fixtures in one patch-many! call all need to be on the same DMX universe.