DMX an Acronym for "Digital Multiplex"

In DMX512, the 512 represents the number of channels a single data link will support. DMX is the Entertainment Lighting industry standard signal for controlling lights with effects, such as moving head’s, colour changers, and so on.

More recently other companies have started to adopt DMX for controlling other equipment such as lasers, smoke machines, pyrotechnics, curtains and many other electronic devices. The instant benefit of DMX is the cable just a 3 core wire is needed to connect a DMX device, the DMX device use one or more of the 512 channels. A device that has four features would use four channels of DMX, each channel can be sent a data packet between 0 and 255.

Imagine a lighting box with the ability to change its brightness using 0 – 255, 0 being off and 255 being full on. The lighting box would only need one DMX channel, the lighting box knows which of the 512 channels he is allocated too and only watches for changes on that particular channel.

To synchronise DMX equipment to a laser show it is required for the laser show system to have the ability to send DMX data. The Pangolin QM2000 PCI board and software we use has this ability allowing us to take control of any DMX device used in an event, we can design a show with music, lasers, moving lights and other electrically controlled devices all perfectly synchronised to music. You can read more about Pangolin by visiting the company’s website found in our links section.