I just wanted to take a moment and throw out a quick teaser of what's coming up.

Before I continue with "Programming Inexpensive Controllers", I'm going to revisit the "Illuminating DMX" series. I want to take some time to go over DMX protocol charts, which are found in the manuals of most lighting instruments. In short these charts explain what parameters of the instrument are controlled by what DMX channel. I feel like it's important to understand this, so that you can develop a strategy for addressing your instruments, as well as programming scenes.

I would also like to take a trip through audio world for a little while. Some of this will probably sound like a foreign language to some of you, but that's ok. I'll try to unpack this stuff in depth sometime. I recently had a customer purchase two Dante-MY-16-AUD digital network cards. These cards allow the user to take 16 channels of audio, bi-directionally into and out of a console via Gigabit Ethernet. They were installed into a Yamaha LS9 digital audio console. The goal was to take 32 direct outs from the console at front of house, and feed a computer in a broadcast room in another part of the church, then record that using Pro Tools 10. I'll take some time to explain how we had to patch the direct outs in the console, set up the Dante Virtual Soundcard on the computer, and build an aggregate audio device in Pro Tools so we could have local monitoring in the broadcast room.

~Andy