Many clients have some collection of older technology or modern lighting special effects and lighting projectors that they want to keep in service in their theater and exhibit systems.

In some cases these effects only need to see power to auto-operate, and in other cases they need to see power for a motor and then fade a lamp up and down.

Bowen staff members have just developed a new interface that will work with any show control system that sends industry standard DMX commands, so it works with ECCS, Spice, Spitz, Dataton, Leprecon, Alcorn, Mediasonic, AMX, Lutron, and other show control systems.

Here are the details:

The 19” rack mount unit contains eight channels of switch/dimmer modules, addressable in blocks of 4. Any of the channels can be switched power OR a 5A dimmer. For many special effects you can use four channels as switched outlets and then four channels as dimmers. The unit can be internally set with jumpers so each outlet is either a switch or a dimmer. Setting the bottom row of outlets to dim, the top row to switch, and assigning the same address to both rows allows both the top and bottom outlet to react to the same DMX address, thus causing the switch to come on and the dimmer to fade. When the module sees a DMX value of 1% or more, the top outlet turns on and the bottom one begins to fade with the incoming DMX level value.