Request for CMB16 - DC LOR Controller

[richardh]

LED DC Based Floods are nice and the LOR Controller is nice but there is one thing that is stopping me from using it and will be sitting on the shelf again collecting dust for the 2nd year now.

When I do a fade, It ramps up to quickly and the rest of the fade is slow.

It would be nice if could make you own fading curve for a controller. There are a lot of DC based LEDs out there and it seems that everyone has their own fading curve so it is impossible to make a "one size fits all" fading curve for the DC Controller.

Right now I am able to get the fade I want for the first 10% of the fade but then of course it takes forever for it to come up to 100%.

Anyway it would be nice if LOR somehow made it in the hardware Utility where you could make your own fade curve and then download it to the controller as all fades would be based off the custom curve sorta of like the photo below.



Maybe that is something the LOR team can work on for next year.

This would even be nice for AC controllers since LED Strings don't have the same fading curve as incandesent lights.

-Richard

[Richard Hamilton]

I agree. I mentioned something similar to this in another posting. It would be nice to have several curves to apply to different sets of leds because even different colors appear at different intensities for the same voltage level.

[Dennis Cherry]

Thank You Richard, you stated that very well. I email this to Dan a month ago with pictures of the problem. In the hardware utility if you raise the slider 1% you actually get a 6% jump in the voltage not 1%, if you raise the slider to 10% you get 15%. Slider 20% you get 22%, 40% gets you 40%, now you can see it is not linear and the LED fades need this area linear to fade right especially the first 10%. This does not follow the same curve used on the regular AC controllers.

Hope we get a way to customize our own curves for LED's, etc.

I also shelved using the CMB16D to control LED's this year.

[Richard Hamilton]

Dennis Cherry wrote:

Thank You Richard, you stated that very well. I email this to Dan a month ago with pictures of the problem. In the hardware utility if you raise the slider 1% you actually get a 6% jump in the voltage not 1%, if you raise the slider to 10% you get 15%. Slider 20% you get 22%, 40% gets you 40%, now you can see it is not linear and the LED fades need this area linear to fade right especially the first 10%. This does not follow the same curve used on the regular AC controllers.

Hope we get a way to customize our own curves for LED's, etc.

I also shelved using the CMB16D to control LED's this year.

Yo Dennis, we might be talking about two different things... not sure. I have not measured the output voltage at low percentages so I take your word on what it does. If Dan were to correct it, that would actually make the problem worse for LEDs. You want a larger percentage at the low end, not a linear range.

A linear curve won't give smooth LED ramping. LEDs are not linear. They need more voltage change at the low end of the voltage range in order to have a visible effect, and they need very little voltage change at the upper end to visualize the same effect.

Let me toss out one more thing. Even with incandescant bulbs, it would be nice to have mapping if you want to have a smooth ramp. The reason is that eyes are not linear. Eyes see brightness on a log scale. If you want a bulb which is set at 10% to appear twice as bright, then the answer is not 20%. Another way to say it is that changing brightness from 10% to 20% is a LOT more noticeable to the eye than changing it from 80% to 90%, even with incandescant bulbs.

I think we all agree that a curve mapper is what we desire regardless of how we say it ;-)

Edit: And as I mentioned above, one curve does not fit all. Ideally, there should be ability to have several curves... one for red led, one for blue, one for incandescant, etc. And since you would probably put the same types of lights on the same channel, it would be good to allowing assiging a particular map to a channel. Once, mapped, we could all share the same curve files. Make sense?

[Dennis Cherry]

Richard Hamilton wrote:

Dennis Cherry wrote:

Thank You Richard, you stated that very well. I email this to Dan a month ago with pictures of the problem. In the hardware utility if you raise the slider 1% you actually get a 6% jump in the voltage not 1%, if you raise the slider to 10% you get 15%. Slider 20% you get 22%, 40% gets you 40%, now you can see it is not linear and the LED fades need this area linear to fade right especially the first 10%. This does not follow the same curve used on the regular AC controllers.

Hope we get a way to customize our own curves for LED's, etc.

I also shelved using the CMB16D to control LED's this year.

Yo Dennis, we might be talking about two different things... not sure. I have not measured the output voltage at low percentages so I take your word on what it does. If Dan were to correct it, that would actually make the problem worse for LEDs. You want a larger percentage at the low end, not a linear range.

A linear curve won't give smooth LED ramping. LEDs are not linear. They need more voltage change at the low end of the voltage range in order to have a visible effect, and they need very little voltage change at the upper end to visualize the same effect.

Let me toss out one more thing. Even with incandescant bulbs, it would be nice to have mapping if you want to have a smooth ramp. The reason is that eyes are not linear. Eyes see brightness on a log scale. If you want a bulb which is set at 10% to appear twice as bright, then the answer is not 20%. Another way to say it is that changing brightness from 10% to 20% is a LOT more noticeable to the eye than changing it from 80% to 90%, even with incandescant bulbs.

I think we all agree that a curve mapper is what we desire regardless of how we say it ;-)

Edit: And as I mentioned above, one curve does not fit all. Ideally, there should be ability to have several curves... one for red led, one for blue, one for incandescant, etc. And since you would probably put the same types of lights on the same channel, it would be good to allowing assiging a particular map to a channel. Once, mapped, we could all share the same curve files. Make sense?

I agree that making our own curve would help make LED's fade as expected,but that would probably take a new controller with enough memory to store all the different curves.

My test was putting a CB16PC and CMB16D on the same ID's (01) and put a string of Cool White LED's on channel 1 of the CBT16PC and a small string of the same Cool Whites on the CMB16D channel 1, and used a current limiting circuit on the CMB16D to limit the current to 20ma maximum. I then moved the slider up one percent and the DC LED's came on almost to about 50%, the same LED's on the CBT16PC barely came on with a very low glow.

All my tests so far indicate the need for smaller changes in the first 25% of the intensity not more. My display will be almost 100% LED for my first year, my initial testing just to get 1/2 intensities on some of my strings (AC) is sometimes as low as 10%. This is a visual opinion

I have used LED's ever since they started using them in all kinds of electronic products, I have been in electronics all my life and got my formal training in 1962, I am not a novice, but sometime do make mistakes. Looking at what manufacturers are trying to do with LED's has changed some of my opinions in which design(s) work best for animating with LED's.

[richardh]

It would be nice if you could assign a fading curve for each channel on a board but I would settle if you could adjust it for the entire board.

There would be other uses also. Let's say that one controller is pulling to many amps which is tripping a breaker. One quick fix solution would be to make a custom fade where the top end is only 60% and send it to the controller. So a 100% singal becomes 60%, a 50% signal would become 30%, etc. This would save you from having to go into the sequencer and trying to adjust all your values to a lower setting for all the channels on that controller.

[Richard Hamilton]

richardh wrote:

It would be nice if you could assign a fading curve for each channel on a board but I would settle if you could adjust it for the entire board.

There would be other uses also. Let's say that one controller is pulling to many amps which is tripping a breaker. One quick fix solution would be to make a custom fade where the top end is only 60% and send it to the controller. So a 100% singal becomes 60%, a 50% signal would become 30%, etc. This would save you from having to go into the sequencer and trying to adjust all your values to a lower setting for all the channels on that controller.

Yup, yup, another good idea. I was doing this manually a couple years ago before going to LEDs, and it was a pain in the neck to manually change those channels.