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DMX Universe & Address Planner Calculator

Plan DMX addressing for a rig: enter fixture groups with their channel footprint and count to get start addresses for every fixture, the universes needed, channels used and spare, a tidy "round to 10" addressing option, universe splits by position, and the dip-switch or 9-bit binary settings for old fixtures.

Group A name

Group A: fixtures

Group A: channels each

Group B name

Group B: fixtures

Group B: channels each

Group C name

Group C: fixtures

Group C: channels each

Addressing style

First universe number

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How it works

each fixture occupies start … start + channels − 1 · a universe holds channels 1–512; a fixture never straddles two · tidy: next start = previous start + max(10, footprint rounded up to 10) · dip switches: address = Σ switch_i × 2^(i−1), i = 1…9

DMX gives a lighting console 512 control channels per line, and every fixture claims a block of them starting at the address set on its menu, so patching is the bookkeeping of laying those blocks end to end without overlaps or straddling the 512 boundary. Packed addressing wastes nothing but is brittle, because changing one fixture's mode shifts everything after it; starting fixtures on round numbers or in blocks per type costs a few channels and saves hours when a rig changes on the road. When the blocks outrun one universe, the rig is split across lines — ideally by where fixtures hang, so a fault isolates to one area — and legacy fixtures set the same address in binary on nine little switches.

Worked example

Sixteen 8-channel washes, eight 20-channel movers and 24 dimmer channels total 312 channels. Packed they fill U1 from 1 to 312; tidy addressing puts the washes at 1, 11, 21 … 151, the movers at 161, 181 … 301 and the dimmers from 321 to 344, still inside one universe with 168 channels spare. Wash 5 at address 41 is switches 1, 4 and 6 on (1 + 8 + 32).

Frequently asked questions

What happens if two fixtures share an address?

They mirror each other — sometimes intended (a pair of identical washes on one address saves channels), usually an error. Fixtures of different types on overlapping addresses behave erratically as each reads the others' data.

Address 1 or 0?

DMX channels run 1–512. Some old dip-switch fixtures count from 0 (address 0 = channel 1); if such a fixture is one channel off, that is why — set it one lower.

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