Vixenlights Sequence VIX File Structure

[jwithee]

I am trying to use Vixenlights to control my own custom board, but I cannot use the vixen plugin API. Instead I have written my own control software in linux.

Although I do want to use vixen to design the sequence. I was looking at the saved sequence file *.vix, which seems to be xml and pretty straight forward. I think the data I want is in the "<eventValues>" tags, but I can't follow exactly what the format is.

Here is an example: (this is 16 channels with 1 sec sequence with a period of 0.1 sec with every other channel on.)

<EventValues>/////////////wAAAAAAAAAAAAD/////////////AAAAAAAAAAAAAP////////////8AAAAAAAAAAAAA/////////////wAAAAAAAAAAAAD/////////////AAAAAAAAAAAAAP////////////8AAAAAAAAAAAAA/////////////wAAAAAAAAAAAAD/////////////AAAAAAAAAAAAAA==</EventValues>

I thought that each character in binary represented the brightness value for some particular time in the sequence, but this doen't seem to be the case because their is 216 characters not 160 (16chan*1sec/0.1sec)

Any help on the actual format would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Jason

[aERonAUtical96]

The characters are base64 encoded values of bytes. When you decode the string, you should get an array of bytes. Each byte represents a cell's level of intensity (0-255).

What language are you using to program this?

[jwithee]

Thanks aERonAUtical96,

That is exactly what I was looking for. I found a b64 to binary c program and it works awesome.

I am currently righting my program in C. It is pretty basic program that waits for a request for data from my dimmer board (AVR controlled 16-Channel triac board), and then sends a brightnesses for each channel.

The board is running wireless via bluetooth SPP.

I like vixens interface, but I wanted to run the program without having to build a plugin and run it on windows. This is the best of both worlds.

[mrpackethead]

I've been doing the opposite.. I just wanted to use vixen to play my sequences ( via dmx ) because i've found using vixen to be very time consuming..

I ended up using some perl to create the xml file that vixen then reads.

Its defintly base64, its all the values for one channel, then all the values for the next etc etc, at the interval specified..