ENTTEC Welcomes a New Pixel Link to the Family

	ENTTEC's PLINK CVC3

For designers, working with LEDs -- especially LED tape -- can be unnecessarily complex. ENTTEC's line of LED products helps eliminate that complexity, freeing designers from endless spreadsheets so they can spend more time actually doing what they love: designing. The E.L.M, the Pixelator, the Pixie Driver, and the Pixel Link (PLink) line of products let designers focus on their creativity, rather than the technical complexities of working with large numbers of pixels. "I grew up as a designer with DMX512; it has always been, since the time my professional career was getting off the ground, an essential tool I used. It shaped my designs because of the natural stopping points built into it as limitations, like there being only so many 96-way racks I could run off one daisy chain. But when pixel-based products came along a few years ago, the need to bust out past 512 slots worth of controllable attributes in a data run just grew exponentially. I'm very glad that our PLink products allow up to 340 pixels to be controlled with each cable home-run, it helps tremendously in distributing the data we need to make projects work now," explains ENTTEC Americas general manager, Jeremy Kumin.

The newest product in the ENTTEC LED driver line is the PLink CVC3; this compact unit gives designers the option of working with both pixel controlled LEDs and standard LEDs, particularly LED tape. The CVC3 can be used to control three dimmable channels of RGB LED tape, or three individual single color LED strips. The CVC3 is designed to work with all brands of RGB LED tape, as well as the entire line of ENTTEC proprietary pixel tape, and is an integral part of the popular ENTTEC Pixelator system. The CVC3 can control up to 340 RGB LED strips or 1024 single color LED strips. Multiple CVC3 units can be daisy chained together with the same PLink data, eliminating the need to have individual data runs from each ENTTEC Pixelator or Pixelator Mini port. Configuring the CVC3 is extremely simple, since the DMX address is automatically assigned based on location in the chain.

Installation of the CVC3 is incredibly easy, and it can be used with data extensions of up to 984' (300m) using a Cat6 cable and features a compact, easy to conceal design. A single CVC3 might be perfect for a small design; when it is time for a larger project, the CVC3 can be easily scaled up by daisy chaining more into the system, and each CVC3 unit has incremental automatic addressing, so the numbering is already taken care of by the device without any dip switches. Kumin adds, "Integrating a constant voltage based PWM driver with the PLink system is a great way to combine the best of both worlds. You get the daisy-chaining convenience of DMX and PLink, but you get the small form factor which is easy to conceal on set, and the affordability of a system that goes hand in hand with remote power supplies. It's really elegant. Lots of people saw this at LDI and thought it was perfect for getting a different color on every stair riser for a musical set they were lighting. That's just one example but it's an easy one to explain."