Basic dawn, dusk and tracking cues

[d...@sloane-squared.com]

I have a couple of long term, very basic installations that work nicely using ola_recorder playback and cron jobs.   One has a basic web front end to trigger those shw files. 

I need a little more functionality such as dawn and dusk triggers and tracking cues so that different channels can be switched on and off without affecting the underlying state.  Some of the channels have HID discharge fixtures connected, so I'd rather not wait for them to cool down when a user accidently clicks a state without them in. 

Before I take the plunge and switch to Pharos for a 20 channel, single universe installation are there any existing projects that handle this basic functionality?   There are other reasons to switch to Pharos, but in the short term I'd like to stick with what I have. 

Thanks in advance. 

Regards,

Dan

[Peter Newman]

Hi Dan,

I can think of a few options around the OLA/open source end of things. For the dawn/dusk, a quick Google found this, I've never used it, and I'm sure there are lots of similar things, most decent programme libraries with a good selection of contributed libraries will have some means of doing dawn/dusk calculations, it looks like this has implemented it and done most of the leg work:

https://github.com/mfreeborn/heliocron

You could possibly do some stuff similar to tracking by running two ola_recorder instances and using OLAs merging algorithms to deal with them, if it's just as simple as not turning off HIDs, although I appreciate that won't give full tracking, but maybe just controlling different fixtures via different recorders might be sufficient?

You could also look at other software such as QLC+, either completely standalone, or outputting to OLA so your DMX output side doesn't need to change at all. I'm not sure whether it does tracking, but I think it's one of the most mature, or at least longest lasting open source lighting consoles.

You could also roll something yourself with our APIs if you really wanted.