First steps with my DMX Dimmer

My adventures with the DMX Lightshow go on.
After successfully installing and setting up the SIUDI-6C DMX controller I ordered a DMX dimmer on the german Pro Lighting internet shop.

The package was delivered today:
it's a nice Eurolite "EDX-4" 4-channel dimmer, that is, a piece of hardware that has four standard power sockets and can adjust the power output on each of them, on a more or less linear scale from 0 to 100%. An arbitrary number of lights can be connected to each socket (without exceeding the unit's total power limit of course): the beauty of it is that since it uses standard Shuko sockets you can connect almost everything to it (even my old and dusty bedside lamp).

I didn't expect it to be so big. My hand is on the picture for scale reference purposes.

This evening I decided to give the dimmer unit a try and wrote a little .NET managed library that wraps the programming interface included in the SIUDI-6C SDK by Sunlite. Then I quickly threw together a very ugly interface that enables to interactively set the output value on a single DMX channel, hooked the dimmer on the DMX controller, switched the power on and... lo' and behold, it works!

Video hosted by Vimeo.

Ok, the hardware part would be ready... now it's time to get working on the software! I think I'll try to build something using WPF, which is a fairly new technology to me and seems to have a lot of interesting additions in .NET 3.5 SP1. We'll see.