Add Eurolite Color Chief Plugin

[FloEdelmann]

Eurolite's Color Chief DMX console supports fixtures and now has a fixture editor software for Windows. The fixture definitions themselves are binary files, so they will be hard to generate in an OFL plugin.

For the announcement, see this German Facebook post. The current (small) fixture library and the fixture editor software can be downloaded from the Color Chief product page.

[Sorontik]

Hey, i just stumbled upon this issue via google (while searching for a possibility to create custom fixture libs for the ColorChief) and thanks to you i found the PC Program.
Thanks for that.

I then decided to take a quick look at the format and from what i can see, the binary format seems pretty easy:

(the following is derived from generating some lib files with the EuroliteColorChief program and looking at the results via Notepad++ and HEX-Viewer Plugin, so no guarantees whatsoever)

as far as i can see, it consists of 3 parts:

{1} a 10 byte prefix

• the first 9 bytes seem to be a constant 0x08 00 04 08 00 04 08 00 04
  => probably some sync or file-id magic number thing, i'd say just copy and don't question it
• the tenth byte is a version number (0x00 for the old V1.0, 0x01 for the current V2.0)

{2} an array of 1-byte values which assign a dmx-channel to a function

• the position in the array corresponds to the function
  (Red1, Green1, Blue1, ColdWhite1, Amber1, UV1, Dimer1, Shutter1
  => bear in mind that the ColorChief provides 4 sections per fixture, so these entries repeat four times
  followed by the fixture-wide ColorWheel and the three free patch potis)
• the value is the dmx-channel relative to the fixture start address
  Value = fixture-channel = Output DMX-Channel
  0x01 = first channel = FixtureStartAddress+0,
  0x02 = second channel = FixtureStartAddress+1)
• the values (=channel numbers) are capped at a value of 0x3d and 0x3d also means that a function is not used/patched/supported
  the website states that "Each device can occupy up to 30 channels", but the PC-Software caps values only at 60/61, not sure which of these limits should be used

{3} a padding with 154 0x00's, up to a total length of 200 bytes

Given the simplicity of the binary format, it shouldn't be too difficult to write a plugin for it, but since I don't much know about your OFL structure and internals and i don't use JS, i can't do it myself.
(Besides I don't need it, i just wanted to dump the format info here, in case anyone is interested)

[FloEdelmann]

Wow, thanks for reverse-engineering and the write-up! 🚀

The format indeed seems really simple. To recap:

Meaning of bytes

Bytes	Function
1 … 9	constant 08 00 04 08 00 04 08 00 04
10	version code 01
11	channel number of Red 1
12	channel number of Green 1
13	channel number of Blue 1
14	channel number of White 1
15	channel number of Amber 1
16	channel number of UV 1
17	channel number of Dimmer 1
18	channel number of Shutter 1
19 … 26	channel numbers of Red 2 … Shutter 2
27 … 34	channel numbers of Red 3 … Shutter 3
35 … 42	channel numbers of Red 4 … Shutter 4
43	channel number of Color Wheel
44 … 46	channel numbers of Free Patch 1 … Free Patch 3
47 … 200	154 bytes padding 00 00 00 … 00

Would you be willing to help test/verify a plugin if I implement it? Do you have access to any fixtures that are included in the Open Fixture Library?