Q Light Controller+

Looking to connect the control for my DMX lighting on my model railway using QLC+ to JMRI running on the same computer. I have a working network connected Art-Net (4 universe) to my model railway room lighting. I currently have LED multi color strip lights (5 colors- RGB, Ww, Cw) on 15 dimmer channels (3 zones) and individual lights on their own dimmers (total about 50 channels when I am finished).

So far, I see that I can control everything quite well on QLC. I have a theatre background so building scenes and cue lists, sequences, etc seems pretty straightforward on QLC. I have only just started to play with the features, but I can control the lights in the next room from QLC and make scenes. Still working on turning it into a show with transitions, but I think I should be able to figure that out.

What I need help with is that I would like to auto trigger the different sequences based on the time of day on the model railway. I run a program called JMRI (jmri.org) for my signals, track power, turnouts, etc. I would really like to utilize the "fast clock" (feature that allows a speed adjusted clock to set the time at a rate different from real time and set the time to a specific start time) to trigger lighting changes on the layout. Using the fast clock I can have an entire 24hour day pass in as little as a few hours. What this means for me is that I would like the lighting to follow the fast clock. For example, at 4am, the layout would be moon lit and have limited street lights and no building lights, but at 5am have building lights start coming on and by 7am have the ambient lighting change to sunrise. I would like to have a few lighting sequences to cover the course of a few different "fast clock" days to transition from night to day back to night and have features like neon signs and street lights come on at different times (based on the JMRI time). I use the fast clock for simulated operations typically with a 4:1 ratio so that an 8 hour shift only takes 2 hours in real time.

Is there a known way to integrate the two systems so that I am not reinventing the wheel? Looking at the web-api features, I think I could have JMRI call up a function at a specific time and have that function start a sequence within QLC. I can publish things like fast clock time to a MQTT broker, if that helps. Not sure where to look for this integration, but hoped that the group would have some ideas.

Thanks -Eric

Eric,

Welcome to this forum.
You could have a look at the show-part from QLC+
You can arrange multiple tracks and they play time-based-ish... I don't know how you are going to alter the playback speed though...
(and the show part can be a little buggy from time to time. For sure when you copy & paste things)
Other than that, you could create 1 huge master chaser list, redirecting its actions to sub chasers. Here you can alter the hold times with an external controllable VC timer widget.
Create a backup and play around.
EnJoY

Thanks for the welcome. I have been playing around a bit since my post. I think your idea of a triggered chase will work. I may just try and set up transitions like you suggested, that are more of stepping stones along the way and just trigger 1/2 hour times from the other program. Or deal with the same length transitions but start them off the external triggers. I am trying to use the WebAPI function call by the other program at the moment. I will let the group know if I am successful. I can output the time every min (virtual minute). But I don’t know how to have QLC+ ready and interpret the time.

This is a rather fun experiment.
Eric