Intelligent DMX light design

The Abstract VR8 was one of the first moulded plastic lighting scanners to appear on the market, and needed to have some novel features to set it apart from the crowd.

The Abstract design team produced the elegant housing, the internal mechanics and the optics, with mountings and moulded buttons to match our hardware design, then passed a prototype unit to us so we could bring it to life.

Most DMX lighting effects at the time used miniature switches to set the options on the device, which invariably caused great problems to users who could not think in binary while hanging from a ladder. We decided that push buttons and digital displays were the way to go, so the VR8 sported an easy to use option system. It also had advanced microstepping software to give smooth movement of the stepper motors, and the amazing automatic Abstract light show function. However, the hardware design was optimised for low cost, as many thousands of units were to be produced.

Once the design was completed, Abstract began manufacture of the electronics boards with software supplied by us.