Lanbox

This article is still under construction.

The Lanbox is a dmx lighting controller produced and sold by CDS Advanced Technology bv. https://www.lanbox.com/service/about/ It comes with a dedicated software published by CDS, 'LC Edit', which can be installed on Windows Systems, and OS X up to OS X 10,11 El Capitan Included. For later versions of OS X and Linux operating systems, the workaround is to use a virtualized or emulated Windows system.

As described below, there are many more ways than LC Edit to communicate with the lanbox.

Particularities of the Lanbox include:

• The Lanbox can work as a standalone controller (it has internal memory): Every time it gets plugged into electricity it will start from exactly the state where it has last been saved last, which can for example be the beginning cue of cue list consisting of follow cues with waiting times between the cues. It can therefore be used standalone for example for installations, where the same program should be executed every day.
• The Lanbox Reference Chart gives a complete list of Hexadecimal Codes that need to be send to the Lanbox via USB or Network connection in order to execute certain commands. This allows for the development of a Lanbox library in any programming language on the basis of which own software patches can be written to control lights. Gangplank has been invested in developing such a Lanbox library for the Pure Data programming language. Check Lanbox Access with Pure Data for these patches.
• The Lanbox works with a layer structure much like a graphics editor. In each layer one can decide to give intensity values to a subset of channels. Layers can be made more or less transparent, allowing for smooth fades between different chases running on different layers.
• Layers can be used in an "ADD" mode, which means that the values given to channels in this layer minus 128 (or minus 50%) are being add/subtracted to/from the values coming from other layers. This gives an easy way to add some wave movement or flickering movement etc onto a fade that is happening in another layer.
• When channels are not given any value in a specific layer, the values from lower layers pass through from below without being changed. In contrast if a channel is set to zero in a (non-transparent) layer, then this channel can participate in cue lists that are running in lower layers without the value of those cue lists being visible on the channel (the zero overwrites what comes from lower layers). At a certain point in time, when needed, the zero value in the upper layer can be removed, making the channel value jump to the exact level it should be on according to the lower level cue list. This can be useful for example when one lamp after the other is supposed to join a common fade in, but the timing of when they are supposed to join depends on certain actions and is not possible to fix in advance.