Introduction

Synopsis

Pylux is a program designed for the creation and management of documentation for entertainment purposes. Its primary purpose is the creation of documentation for theatrical lighting scenarios.

Pylux can be easily extended to encompass additional functionality and the default installation contains the necessary modules to create documentation in plaintext format of any style using simple templating tools.

Interface

Everything you would need to do can be done through submitting commands on the command line. In the current implementation, this is done through an interactive prompt, although could be extended to incorporate a GUI, non-interactive CLI or even a web interface.

Basic Concepts

Pylux is centered around a JSON file which contains all the information about your show. The JSON file is fundamentally unstructured and consists of an unordered list of fundamental objects, which will take one of the types below.

Fixture
A single physical lighting fixture, such as a PAR can. A fixture will further contain a list of DMX functions, which act in the same way as the other fundamental objects, but will never appear outside of a fixture object in the show file itself.
Registry
A mapping of functions to addresses within a single DMX universe.
Cues
A snapshot of the levels of some functions.
Groups
A list of fixtures in a certain order.

These data types are referred to often in the remainder of this guide.

Each of these object types will have an arbitrary number of key/value pairs associated with them. These pairs may contain any type of information, but there are four which are common to all object types:

type
The type of object. For example metadata or fixture.
uuid
A universally unique identifier pointing to this object.
ref
A human-readable identifier unique to this object within others of its type. This will be the number which is used to call and pass this object to commands.
label
A non-required field which acts as the fallback when no other information about the object is available.