DMX Lighting Control a Different Way

Preface: We use ONYX by Obsidian (Windows based) to run our house and stage lights via DMX.

Initial Goal: Provide, at minimum, control of the house lights from a touch screen or other input trigger.

Solution:

Onyx has a fabulous Manager application that can auto-start when Onyx fires up that has scheduling and a web control server.

The web control server is where the power lies.

In combination with Home Assistant and NodeRED, we now have NodeRED flows that listen to dummy script events that subsequently trigger HTTP requests which then fire off any number of pre-programmed lighting cues in Onyx.

So, with a tap of a button, Home Assistant sends an event through the event bus, NodeRED sees it and filters the event using regex, then NodeRED sends an HTTP request to the IP of the Onyx computer where the Manager with the web listener is running. The URL sent has parameters that tell Onyx which cue to fire.

Using that, we can now trigger any cue list in our lighting system with any trigger in Home Assistant.

The down side is that you need an always on Windows machine that’s running Onyx and Onyx Manager to ensure your lighting system will respond.

The up-sides outweigh the down.

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until windows does a forced update reset and the lights don’t work…