DMX Lighting Control Software

Lights such as the Kino Flo Select 31 LED use a DMX control interface to signal changes of light level and color temperature.

DMX is an open protocol and there are a large number of possibilities for hardware and software control. We’ve tried out several of these are more oriented to stage control.

For DMX controller hardware we recommend the Enttec DMX USB Pro controller.

Imatest 2020.1 introduced a Lighting Control GUI interface to communicate with DMX hardware.

For computer control software with a user Interface, Imatest Master 2020.1 introduced Imatest Lighting Control. See also Q Light Controller Plus (QLC+) which also has nice cross-platform support.

For light control software that provides an automated API, the best one we’ve found is the Open Lighting Architecture (OLA). The downside of this is that it only has good support for Linux. Below is a python script that includes an example OLA call. Here is a basic call to set the lights to middle color temp and maximum intensity:

from ola.ClientWrapper import ClientWrapper
intensity = 255
cct       = 127
universe = 1
data      = array.array('B') 
data.append(intensity)
data.append(cct)
data.append(intensity)
data.append(cct)
wrapper = ClientWrapper()
client = wrapper.Client()
client.SendDmx(universe, data, DmxSent)