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Any rumors for LOR 2011?


scubado

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After going back through all my notes I think the best thing to do is just wait it out a bit and see by like Jun what has been officially announced by LOR and then plan the 2011 display. I fell like there may just be way to much good stuff coming out to jump on things to soon. I rather have a smaller display for 2011 then originally planed, then buy a bunch of stuff now to learn LOR has better stuff out 2 months latter.

It should be an interesting year indeed :D

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csf wrote:

After going back through all my notes I think the best thing to do is just wait it out a bit and see by like Jun what has been officially announced by LOR and then plan the 2011 display. I fell like there may just be way to much good stuff coming out to jump on things to soon. I rather have a smaller display for 2011 then originally planed, then buy a bunch of stuff now to learn LOR has better stuff out 2 months latter.

It should be an interesting year indeed :D


I agree, I'm going to wait and see what comes out.
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Sorry... I missed this thread for a while.... It was a crazy end of year but I am finally catching up a bit on things not related to immediate customer support.

Here are some of the questions I missed:

Dan any idea when you may be announcing prices for the CCB, and CCF?

It will be soon. We will give an update before the end of Feb.

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One big question is: When will LOR have an IP interface to the controller? I am thinking more of a REST or SOAP interface that lets us tell send a command to Unit 13, channel 8, On 50%.

We do not plan to implement any new protocols to the controllers. We will remain with LOR and DMX as the supported interfaces.

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Dan..will the floods run on a standard DC card, or have their own controller? Kit..or only available assembled?

The floods have their own high power constant current driver. The card has 6 channels and supports 2 flood heads. They will not be in a kit. The LEDS are high power, surface mount and use a aluminum PCB and are in a sealed aluminum/glass head. Sealed cable connections, etc.. They are not going to be inexpensive floods. One of them probably has the power of 10 rainbow floods (or more).

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But I egress Dan and ask, is there any thing that will help those of us with the G1 boards to make our LEDs look better. Both while programming and while running a show?

Yes the Gen 2 firmware will be available for G1 controllers. It will allow you to have different dimming curves for our LEDs so that they act more like incandescents. New lighting effects such as shimmer speed, strobe effects, etc.. will be made on G1 and G2 controllers. People with G1 controller will reap all the benefits of Gen 2 firmware and software changes.

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Will the Cosmic Color Floods be showing up in the summer sales? Do these have an inbuilt controller like the CCR's and CCB's or do you connect to 3 DC channels on a DC board?

They will be in the summer sale. They have their own controllers. I will warn people that they are not cheap. The are high power, quality, outdoor LED RGB floods.

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Do you have any more information on the ghost loads and snubbers for 240 countries - can these be retrofitted to the CTB16PC or do these exist on the newer Gen2 controllers?

The Gen2 hardware changes are on card changes and can not be retro fitted onto Gen 1 controllers. As mentioned, the Gen 2 firmware will be available on G1 controllers.

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I wish LOR would just transition to DMX and then sticky channels and other protocol based issues become a thing of the past.

LOR controllers do support DMX today. And with the enhanced DMX support you could run your system as a DMX system and not use the LOR protocol. However one of the reasons that we did not go with DMX in the first case is that it can be a bit more challenging to get working. I spoke to lighting professionals about the pros and cons of DMX before we went the way we did.

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Will the ethernet interface be based on E131, allowing LOR software to be used with other E131 interfaces?

We will be using an industry standard. Most likely it will be art-net because it is the most used in the lighting industry. That is not cast in stone at this point. In any case it will be "special" because we will also support the LOR protocol as well.

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When you say "enchanced" to support thousands of channels.... Will this involve object oriented/transition processes like in Madrix, Prancer and LSP? Something that helps "write" the sequence for you? As someone coming out of 2010 with 2,300 channels, all this hardware (pixel nodes/cosmic bulbs) is going to be for not without some really smoking good software. Will this software be able to reference lights in a 2D or 3D space as it pertains to auto-sequencing?

We have a number of different types of users and will be making enhancements to help the little guy that is still having problems getting arches to leap and the big guy that has 10,000 channels with tons of RGB and needs things to be approached from a different perspective to function.

On a side note: there was another post where it was mentioned that it was a year between the time we introduced the CCR and then had support for RGB in the software. To those that struggled a bit the first year with the CCRs without RGB support, my apologies. We could have had RGB support that first year but it would have been a kludge and I opted to spend the time having an infrastructure built that makes adding these new feature more "natural" to the code. Also just as the displays are getting more complex the code is as well. As the code becomes more complex the more chance for bugs. So we spent a lot of time adding automated testing code to the system.

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Will this new communications system using power cords (PLC) work with existing controllers if they update the firmware?

No... The PLC requires special hardware that can "listen" in on the power line.

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Dan

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Will this new communications system using power cords (PLC) work with existing controllers if they update the firmware?

No... The PLC requires special hardware that can "listen" in on the power line.

I guess the next question is can you mix the existing PC16 controllers and use the new PLC systems together. IE, can you network your existing controllers and then have a new PLC unit that may be a long distance from your other controllers and use them together?

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With all due respect to the Engineers of Light-O-Rama, I don't think PLC is really a good acronym to use for the new communication system. From what I've seen on these forums, a high majority of us are techies and to us a PLC is a Programmable Logic Controller. Tossing around all these acronyms gets confusing enough sometimes, but then when your using like ones, it makes it more confusing.

Also I have seen PLC a couple different ways in this thread. PLC = Power Line Control and PLC = Power Line Carrier. Which one is it?

This technology is really cool, I don't know if it's been pointed out yet but just as with X-10, if your transmitter is on the A side of your your power panel and your controller is on the B side, if you don't put in a bridge in your panel, you will have communication problems

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toddmoon wrote:

Will this new communications system using power cords (PLC) work with existing controllers if they update the firmware?

No... The PLC requires special hardware that can "listen" in on the power line.

I guess the next question is can you mix the existing PC16 controllers and use the new PLC systems together. IE, can you network your existing controllers and then have a new PLC unit that may be a long distance from your other controllers and use them together?

You will be able to mix PLC and existing controllers. PLC has two parts... The injector which plugs into the power and the controller (for example the CCR controller could come in a PLC version)... The injector plugs into your LOR network like a LOR controller, daisy chained in. Now from the injector you can run extension cords, just like you did in the old days. Just keep pluging stuff in any way you can BUT these devices will be low power LED devices so you will be able to plug in lots of them. No data cables going to them. They just plug in and receive the data via the power line.

Dan
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kzaas wrote:

With all due respect to the Engineers of Light-O-Rama, I don't think PLC is really a good acronym to use for the new communication system. From what I've seen on these forums, a high majority of us are techies and to us a PLC is a Programmable Logic Controller. Tossing around all these acronyms gets confusing enough sometimes, but then when your using like ones, it makes it more confusing.

Also I have seen PLC a couple different ways in this thread. PLC = Power Line Control and PLC = Power Line Carrier. Which one is it?

This technology is really cool, I don't know if it's been pointed out yet but just as with X-10, if your transmitter is on the A side of your your power panel and your controller is on the B side, if you don't put in a bridge in your panel, you will have communication problems


We will get the terms straight. The term PLC has been around for a long time. PLC is used as an acronim for a few terms here... You can for example get Power Line Control using a Power Line Carrier to provice Power Line Communication.

There is no A/B side issue like X10 because unlike X10 which uses one injector for the whole house, our PLC will use one injector per circuit. Thus it will pretty much only make sense for LED applications where you can get 100s of circuits on a single 15 amp circuit.

Dan
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LightORamaDan wrote:


We will get the terms straight. The term PLC has been around for a long time. PLC is used as an acronim for a few terms here... You can for example get Power Line Control using a Power Line Carrier to provice Power Line Communication.
OK, Stop, your just really trying to confuse us now:D

There is no A/B side issue like X10 because unlike X10 which uses one injector for the whole house, our PLC will use one injector per circuit. Thus it will pretty much only make sense for LED applications where you can get 100s of circuits on a single 15 amp circuit.

Thanks for clearing that up, is there any pictures of the injector anywhere?
Thanks, Ken


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bwhitehead wrote:

Dan any time frame on the software release.


We will be releasing software throughout the year. Most major improvements will be done around mid year but we will continue to add things.

One nice thing is that the major changes we will be adding this year are based on infrastructure changes made last year. This means two important things:

1. The infrastructure has seen extensive use during the 2010 season. Weaknesses have been identified and will be improved so this will provide a very stable core for the 2011 season.

2. Because the major infrastructure changes have been made we can concentrate our efforts on features and functionality this year.

Dan
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On the subject of your software releases, you've been talking about a new visualizer. Whats the newest word on that and when might we see it?

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kzaas wrote:

On the subject of your software releases, you've been talking about a new visualizer. Whats the newest word on that and when might we see it?


I will talk to the programmer on that project and get a update for you. ( Actually I am about 6 weekly status reports behind on that project so I will read them first and then talk to the programmer)... Will have a update for you next week.

Dan
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Wow, after reading this thread I'm glad I'm a "Happy" LOR user already and don't need any of this newfangled technology to continue being happy. :)

But, keep up the good work LOR... I'm sure eventually I'll appreciate all this new stuff!!! :D

-Jeff

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LightORamaDan wrote:


The floods have their own high power constant current driver. The card has 6 channels and supports 2 flood heads. They will not be in a kit. The LEDS are high power, surface mount and use a aluminum PCB and are in a sealed aluminum/glass head. Sealed cable connections, etc.. They are not going to be inexpensive floods. One of them probably has the power of 10 rainbow floods (or more).


I use regular floods for the house, as well as lights on a low wall in my yard. The yard would be perfect for spotlights. Will you have spots as well as floods?


Yes the Gen 2 firmware will be available for G1 controllers. It will allow you to have different dimming curves for our LEDs so that they act more like incandescents. New lighting effects such as shimmer speed, strobe effects, etc.. will be made on G1 and G2 controllers. People with G1 controller will reap all the benefits of Gen 2 firmware and software changes.


So as someone with PC kits as they are now, would there be any reason at all to need (or want) to replace current units with the gen2 hardware? Is it pretty much limited to the ghost load?
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DavidPeterson wrote:

LightORamaDan wrote:

The floods have their own high power constant current driver. The card has 6 channels and supports 2 flood heads. They will not be in a kit. The LEDS are high power, surface mount and use a aluminum PCB and are in a sealed aluminum/glass head. Sealed cable connections, etc.. They are not going to be inexpensive floods. One of them probably has the power of 10 rainbow floods (or more).


I use regular floods for the house, as well as lights on a low wall in my yard. The yard would be perfect for spotlights. Will you have spots as well as floods?


Yes the Gen 2 firmware will be available for G1 controllers. It will allow you to have different dimming curves for our LEDs so that they act more like incandescents. New lighting effects such as shimmer speed, strobe effects, etc.. will be made on G1 and G2 controllers. People with G1 controller will reap all the benefits of Gen 2 firmware and software changes.


So as someone with PC kits as they are now, would there be any reason at all to need (or want) to replace current units with the gen2 hardware? Is it pretty much limited to the ghost load?

No spots... Just floods.

As far as PC kits... Other than ghost loads, once you install the Gen2 Firmware into your existing controllers you should be on par with performace.

Dan
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LightORamaDan wrote:

Actually I am about 6 weekly status reports behind on that project so I will read them first and then talk to the programmer)... Will have a update for you next week.

Dan

Funny! We programmers are used to it. My boss is also chronically behind on email and tells me to come find her if there is a problem since she never reads her email on the same day. Glad to hear you go back and read them. When my boss speaks to me at my desk..all prior emails no longer need to be read.

Thanks so much for the updates. Looking forward to new purchases and software. If you need any consumer product testers let us know! lol.

I have a bunch of software requests I will post in another thread.
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Jeffrey wrote:

Wow, after reading this thread I'm glad I'm a "Happy" LOR user already and don't need any of this newfangled technology to continue being happy. ;)

But, keep up the good work LOR... I'm sure eventually I'll appreciate all this new stuff!!! :D

-Jeff


Ditto!

Making my lights flash was a dream come true!

All the the other features are just icing on the cake!

Thanks Dan!
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LightORamaDan wrote:


No spots... Just floods.

As far as PC kits... Other than ghost loads, once you install the Gen2 Firmware into your existing controllers you should be on par with performace.

Dan


Thanks. Hoping for this in the future. For cases of illuminating a bush etc, sounds like the floods would be overkill.
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toddmoon wrote:

The first time I read PLC I kinda thought the same thing Programmable Logic Control. Took me a whole different direction for a moment.

same here
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