sunDial quad, the PLASA Gold award-winning mains LED dimmer from Ar-tistic Licence, has won praise for its ability to provide a smooth LED dim-ming with DMX512.
Following a firmware upgrade, the product got better, with an improvement in dimming resolution now achievable with many theat-rical controllers.
The latest firmware is available free-of-charge and can be uploaded using DMX-Workshop.
How does it work?
DMX512 can control up to 512 channels and has an 8-bit native resolution. This means each channel can be set to a level between 0 and 255 and is encoded as an 8-bit number (256 levels). sunDial quad has a much higher native dimming resolution of 14-bit, so in normal operation a dimmer curve translation is used in effect, sunDial picks ‘sweet spots’ on the response curve to achieve a nice fade.
However, some professional lighting consoles allow two DMX512 channels to be combined to provide up to 16-bit resolution (65,536 different levels). In this scenario, no curve translation is necessary. Following sunDial’s latest firmware upgrade, the console can access all the subtle levels available in sunDial’s high native dimming resolution thus ensuring ultimate dimming performance for applications that demand the most subtle effects.
What are the benefits?
sunDial quad is often used for house lights in theatre, and can be integrated with the stage lighting consoles. As many of the favourite theatrical control-lers feature 16-bit channel resolution, sunDial fit with those parameters.
sunDial quad also has the advantage that its firmware can be upgraded (at zero cost) in the field. Customers can achieve this using the Artistic Licence DMX-Workshop free software package.
For more information, please check the Artistic Licence website
