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 digital IO cards.
Note: This page does not apply to BSOFT digital IO cards. Light-O-Rama can control BSOFT digital IO cards, but if your digital IO card is a BSOFT digital IO card, please see the separate help file page for such cards.
Requirements
In order to use digital IO cards with Light-O-Rama, your computer must have the Universal Library and the InstaCal program.
Limitations of Digital IO Cards
Not all of Light-O-Rama's lighting effects are supported on 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 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 digital IO card, the unit ID is a number between 0 and 99.
Circuit IDs
Each digital IO card can control multiple strings of lights independently. To identify each such string, it is assigned a circuit ID between 0 and 191.
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 Configuration screen (the former may be more convenient for modifying a single channel, and the latter for modifying multiple channels at once).
For a 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 3 of a digital IO card with unit ID 37:
The Channel Settings dialog for a 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 Configuration screen can be accessed by selecting "Channel Configuration" from the Tools menu.