I was a long time Martin Light Jockey user… I had the really old ISA card version of LJ… I got sick of bringing a giant old desktop to shows.

I sold the LJ card and looked around for something new… I bought an Enttec USB pro and started tinkering around with the new free lighting control options…. First I tried Freestyler (which is an open source 70% copy of Light Jockey)… It worked well, but I wanted more.

I found this introduction and the following tutorials and I was officially a Chamsys guy… I fell in love with this system.

I showed it to one of my church tech interns… He read these tutorials and the next week, he had successfully patched and ran a show in our youth space at church (8 movers, leds, conventionals) with his laptop.

I eventually purchased an ASUS EEEtop to exclusively run Chamsys. I had such a great time having more hands on control that I purchased a Mini Wing… I had the Mini-Wing for 2 weeks, but I still wanted encoders… I took back the mini wing, scrounged up some cash and purchased a PC wing, and I love it do death!!!!

Chamsys is great. I started more than 2 years ago with just a dongle and now I have a wing…

I have turned several churches, bands, and lighting guys onto the software.

I only have 2 complaints about chamsys:
>Lack of video tutorials on youtube… I can get piles of tutorials for ETC, Martin, and Grand MA….there isn’t anything to show you how to get started except these tutorials. I have lost 2 churches to ETC only because they had watchable videos on youtube for their volunteer techs.

2 – Dealing with PRG…. PRG is the only supplier in the US…
I would call the reps that PRG recommended… Leave them a really detailed message (what console I am looking for and my contact info) and I would get a call a week later and the first question the reps would ask is “what are you looking for again?”….. Then they say they will call you back with a price…. I wouldn’t get a call/email for another week (even with the advances in computer technology that can give you instant information)….

The process of getting a wing from calling the first (out of four PRG reps) to actually ordering the wing took an entire month!!!

I am not bashing PRG, they are a great company that does a lot of cool stuff…. From a sales stand point, they really suck…. I understand that I am not buying a pile of Vari-Lites, but that does not excuse taking that much time to actually purchase something.

Thank you for taking the time to write these articles.

I’m a little bit of a newbie to the lighting programms and worked more on consoles (but small ones)
I’ve got a enttec usb pro interface and tried playing around with freestyler but the results with my led bars were not sufficient.

Now I started getting into chamsys and so far I like it.
It’s just that I don’t have too much experience with building my own fixtures so I don’t know exactly how I have to put the values….
Made me happy enough that there finally is a programm in which I have a dimmmer mode channel and more than 3 rgb channels but still I don’t know what values I have to fit in to make it decently work

So my question is are there any tutorials on how to create your own led fixtures (maybe for dummies…) cause I already did spend a lot of time on this but sometimes it takes hours and lots of researching on the net until you find what you’re really searching for…. a little help would be greatly appreciated

cheers