Core Concepts

Spectralite is one signal flow. Light enters as a set of fixtures you define, moves through effects you build and stack, becomes device-independent color the engine solves onto real hardware, and leaves as DMX packets on your network. Every panel in the app touches one stage of that flow. Once you can see the stages and the order they build in, the rest of the interface stops being a pile of windows and starts being a pipeline you can read.

This page is the map. Each stage below links to a page that explains it in full, and the terms are introduced in the order they depend on each other, so reading top to bottom follows the same path a signal takes through the app.

The pipeline, stage by stage

You start by describing your hardware. A fixture is one controllable light: a par, a moving head, an LED bar, or a pixel strip. You patch each fixture to a DMX address and a universe so the engine knows which channels drive it. Nothing renders until at least one fixture exists.

Next you give those fixtures a place to live. A position map records where each fixture sits in 3D space. Effects that move light across your rig, a chase running left to right or a wave rolling outward, read that spatial layout to know which pixel is where. Without a map, an effect has no geometry to paint onto.

Then you build the look. An effect is a graph of connected nodes that computes a color for every pixel, recompiled by the engine into a GPU program that runs per pixel each frame. A layer binds one effect to one position map and renders it with an opacity and a blend behavior. You stack layers to combine looks, the same way you stack paint on a canvas: lower layers sit underneath, higher layers composite on top.

Layers run on a clock measured in beats, not seconds. The timeline schedules when each layer is active using a grid of sixteen slots per bar, so a layer can pulse on specific beats and sit silent between them. Set your tempo and the whole stack stays locked to it, which is what lets effects land on the music.

At render time the engine resolves everything to color. You author one device-independent color, a point in a standard color space rather than a set of red, green, and blue levels, and the engine solves that single value onto each fixture's actual emitters. An RGB par, an RGBW strip, and a color-mixing mover all show the color you picked, because the solve accounts for the real emitters each one carries.

Finally the resolved color leaves the machine as output. Spectralite packs each fixture's channels into DMX universes and sends them over your network as Art-Net or sACN. That stream is what your nodes, dimmers, and fixtures ultimately receive.

Follow the flow

Read these in order the first time. Each one assumes the stage before it.