Prevent visible steps when dimming LEDs very slowly down to 0%
Application example: You would like to dim down an RGBW LED stripe from 20% level to 0% within 15 seconds.
From the technical point of view 8-bit dimming (one DMX channel) provides 256 steps only due to DMX specifications. This would result in visible stepping particularly at the very lowest dim level of an LED. For fast dimming down to zero this is no problem, the digital persistance settings will handle that.
If the dimming time is very slow - as shown above - every RC4 dimmer may use the 16-bit dimmer mode to prevent this stepping. Most likely channel 1 is used for the coarse dim level, channel 2 for the fine level.
Combined with the various digital persistance options you will have a super smooth dimming.
The 16-bit mode can be set-up with RDM or (for RC4Magic dimmers) with the commander software ONLY.
Follow this step-by step guide for set-up.
Here we show the set-up with the RC4Magic Commander software.
For Lumenradio based RC4 dimmers this RDM guide might help.
Step 1
- Start the RC4Magic commander and choose the device.
- Go to the curve selection of a dimmer channel.
- Select either "16-bit RAW (High Byte First)" or "...(Low Byte First)".
Step 2
As shown in the image the resulting DMX adresses are shown next to "Control Adresses".
Because two DMX channels are required the DimB address needs to be changed.
Step 3
As soon as you have changed the DMX address of DimB to 3 or higher the "Control Address" turns to green = fine!
Optionally you may use DimB in 16-bit mode either.
Then DMX map would be:
DimA: channel 1 coarse, channel 2 fine
DimB: channel 3 coarse, channel 4 fine
Step 4
For the example shown above I would recommend to additionally set the digital persistance to "Very Slow (max smoothing)" as shown in the image.
If you use DimB in 16-bit mode either please do not miss to set the digital persistance setting to "Very Slow" as well.
If you need support for this set-up please do not hesitate to contact us.
