American DJ myDMX Buddy USB DMX Controller

Comments about American DJ myDMX Buddy USB DMX Controller:

My 10 year old son purchased this DMX controller for his birthday. He is completely obsessed with light shows. He has two PAR lights, a Mini Kinta and another DMX party light that he wanted to control. Most of the usage is creating lighting scenes is his room and setting up lights for parties.
It was a little tricky to get the drivers and software all installed initially. This may have been due to the crummy old PC we were using. The drivers look a little suspicious, "SUSHI" is the title. It is the real thing, so no issues.
Once up and running the MyDMX software was pretty great. The Mini Kinta is a supported model so it was just a matter of selecting the light from the list of premade fixtures. All the other lights we have are Chinese cheapies. This presented very little problem as the included patch building toolset is really easy to use. Even for the light that had DMX value bands for color combinations. It took a little time to figure out (30min) but in that time I had helped my son create and save models for the 2 PARs as well as the party light.
The scene development toolset is very rich. You can control light colors for banks of PARs each on different DMX channels. Time is a little bit complicated and I don't think either my son or I have quite figured out how to gracefully control transitions or sequences of events outside of basic scene changes. Still working on the understanding that part of the tool. At the end of the day, organizing a many light scene that is completely choreographed is a big job. I think this tool can do it, but if that is really the goal spending more than $100 is probably appropriate.
I doubt there is a simpler, more feature rich tool available for the money. We tried some of the free tools just to check them out before purchasing the MyDMX family and they were pretty raw. This just seemed like the best bang for the buck and the most likely to create a good experience for my son.

I am new to the DMX lighting bit, but very technically savvy. Things I think are easy may not be as obvious for someone less comfortable with tech gear in general.

Comments about American DJ myDMX Buddy USB DMX Controller:

Easy to program and love the size.

Comments about American DJ myDMX Buddy USB DMX Controller:

this connected no problem. Just had to grab the software from their website and install it. There are some nice how-to videos on youtube that explain the software. I'm excited to save space on my table by using the laptop instead of the DMX mixer board. Not only that, but it's less to carry around and less outlets used.