BSOFT Digital IO Cards

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In addition to Light-O-Rama controllers and various other types of controllers, Light-O-Rama can control your lights that are hooked up to BSOFT digital IO cards.

 

Note: This page does not apply to any digital IO cards except BSOFT digital IO cards. Light-O-Rama can control other digital IO cards, but if your digital IO card is not a BSOFT digital IO card, please see the separate help file page for such cards.

 

Requirements

 

In order to use BSOFT digital IO cards with Light-O-Rama, your computer must have the Universal Library and the InstaCal program.

 

Limitations of BSOFT Digital IO Cards

 

Not all of Light-O-Rama's lighting effects are supported on BSOFT digital IO cards; to use effects other than "on" or "off" (such as twinkling, shimmering, fading, and brightness intensities other than "totally off" or "full brightness"), you must use Light-O-Rama controllers.

 

Unit IDs

 

Each BSOFT digital IO card has a unit ID, identifying which controller it is.  A controller will only react to lighting commands for its unit ID.  For a BSOFT digital IO card, the unit ID is a number between 0 and 99.

 

Circuit IDs

 

Each BSOFT digital IO card can control multiple strings of lights independently.  To identify each such string, it is assigned a circuit ID between 0 and 95.

 

Assigning Circuits to Channels

 

When a sequence is created using the Sequence Editor, each of its channels can be assigned a string of lights using the Channel Settings dialog or the Channel Property Grid (the former is more convenient for modifying a single channel, while the latter is more convenient for modifying multiple channels at once).

 

For a BSOFT digital IO card, these allow you to set the unit ID and circuit ID assigned to a channel.  Without these being set, controllers will not react to lighting effects that you have put into your sequence.

 

For example, the following shows the Channel Settings dialog for a channel assigned to circuit 7 of a BSOFT digital IO card with unit ID 3:

 

ChannelSettingsBSOFT

The Channel Settings dialog for a BSOFT digital IO card

 

The Channel Settings dialog can be accessed by left-clicking on the channel's button, or by selecting "Change Channel Settings" from the channel button's right-click popup menu.  The Channel Property Grid can be accessed by selecting "Channel Property Grid" from the Tools menu.