Hi all, I'm not a programmer or anything so try to keep things simple for me. I'm in pursuit of a way to trigger my DMX lights by setting them up like a drumpad, where a keystroke would be preset to issue the values for intensity, duration and rate, and then letting off the key would send 0's so it will stop. Its my understanding that all dmx is, are numbers which the lights interpret into whatever their programmed to do, so for a given key it would look something like:

Address Value
1(intensity) 127
2(duration) 0
3(rate) 127

I could use my qwerty keyboard or a regular drumpad, whichever is easier to program for. Please help, ive really wanted to do this for years now but ive only just been able to afford the lights to do so.

I don't know if I understand completely your problem, but I have used wtf2osc http://www.ohloh.net/p/wtf2osc on Ubuntu Lucid Linux to control DMX via PD it worked very nice.

Well the problem is that i need to setup a physical button, whether on a computer keyboard or a drum pad, to send several dmx values like those listed above, and then send 0's when released so that it doesnt continue to trigger. I dont know how to make PD recognize and accept the input from one of these two sources, assign that to a set of dmx values like that listed above, and then recognize a dmx fixture to send those values to. Also i dont know how to make it send 0's when i let go of the key.

Edit: I forgot to describe my setup. I have a dmx light connected to a entec USB pro which has DMX in/out and a usb port which hooks to my win7 machine. If i were to use a drumpad i would connect it via usb. Let me know if there's anything else.

If you want to use the computer keyboard you can use the [key] object, check the help on that, for the drum pad check the help for [notein]. To send the messages to the DMX you can use [sendOSC] and wtf2osc ( http://www.ohloh.net/p/wtf2osc ). wtf2osc comes with a pd patch explaining how to use.

Hope this helps.

Not really, there doesnt appear to be any documentation besides in the wiki, and it doesnt really tell me how to do anything. This whole program seems to be raw programming packaged with a few graphical boxes and some string.

Yes, it is kind of raw programming packaged with a few graphical boxes and some string, that's what is nice about it, you can do whatever you like.

But there is a lot more documentation besides the wiki, you can start here maybe:

http://www.pd-tutorial.com/

or here

http://en.flossmanuals.net/PureData

Also on the program itself if you press ctrl+b you get lots of example patches and every object (graphical box) has a help file showing how to use it and giving some example, just right-click and choose help.

If you prefer video there are some nice tutorials on youtube like this one:

Good luck.