taking over a madrix install...decyphering the patching

[motosega]

Hi, i've recently become responsable for a madrix5 install with 45616 fixtures worth of rgbw led strips connected to a combination of Wled and deskontroller devices. it's in a venue thats open to the public most days.

i'm currently trying to get my head around the system, i know lighting tech well, but this is my first time using madrix.

my inital goal is to understand how eveything is patched in and make some changes (e.g adding some new Led strips, change some errors in the mapping).

the only info i have is the physical location of the artnetnodes, and their ip adresses. but apart from the patch, and an archiectuaral drawing of the building. i don't have any documentation on how the pixels are actualy mapped. the workspace size in madrix is 1547x697 px which is quite unweildy to navigate. unfortunatly there is no CAD or visualiser patch.


does anybody have any general advice on how to proceed?
is there a way to export the patch as an image that i can then label and import back in as a background image?

[Schulze]

Hi motosega,

Welcome to the MADRIX forum!

It might be necessary to use the "highlight" function in the Device Manager or Patch Editor to find out the location of the fixtures.

1) Highlight in Device Manager
- You can highlight all fixtures connected to an interface in the Device Manager. Therefore navigate to "Preferences" > "Device Manager" > "DMX Devices", select on of the interfaces and click at the highlight button (bulb icon).

2) Highlight in Patch Editor
- It is possible to highlight a single or a range of fixtures in the Patch Editor. In order to use it please navigate to "Preferences" > "Patch Editor", activate "Highlight" in the toolbar and select the desired fixtures.

You can't export the patch as an image, but it is possible to export it in the *.csv format. This would allow you to load the patch in a visualizer software.
You can find this function in the Patch Editor via "File" > "Export Fixture List..." > "Export To CSV...".

The following tutorial explains how to add fixtures in the Patch Editor:
https://help.madrix.com/tutorials/m5/HTML/hidd_2d_patch_with_the_patch_editor.html

[motosega]

after realising that the patch editor lacks a few important features to help identify groups. i had a play around with deepseek AI building a javascript visualiser for madrix patches.

its pretty basic and buggy, but it has a feature that lets you hide the fixtures belonging to a particular group, which makes it pretty easy to use to figure out what is where:


(its embedded in an html file so you can just load it into your browser, select a csv file and everything happens localy).
remember this was made by AI so beware...

[Schulze]

Hi motosega,

Thank you for your feedback.

Which important features do you miss?

It is possible to select all fixtures in a Fixture Group via "Select" > "Select All From Selected Fixture Groups". A group needs to be selected beforehand.

[motosega]

ah, i'd totally missed the select menu! much better..

there still a few more things that are making this painfull.

My workspace is too big to zoom out completely to see and moving around it is pretty uncomfortable. an overview would be handy, that shows a zoomed out image of the whole workspace.
there dosent seem to be a way of moving around the workspace other than using the scroll bars, ( or focus ) keybindings would be nice(wasd?) or being able to drag the workspace around with the mouse.

using the deepseek generated tool to explore the workspace and export a .png i have made a background image with labels on the groups, so i'm on my way to understanding where the unmapped leds are hiding, and where i should be adding the extra ones.

[motosega]

also, related to .csv export: if a fixture belongs to more than one group, the group field contains the concatenated list of all the groups , without any delimiter, so since the group names in this setup have spaces in them, they end up being hard to parse programmatically.

consider substituting spaces with underscores, or putting each group name in brackets

in this case i will just manually rename them.

[Schulze]

Hi motosega,

Thank you for your feedback!

I forwarded it to our developers.