egri Posted March 13, 2004 Share Posted March 13, 2004 I've discoverd this low cost pc to DMX unit for sale.http://www.milinst.com/gemodules/genmods.htm#DMX I reckon it would be quite good, even though it only supports 120 channels. You link it to the pc by a serial port. I was wondering if anyone has ever used this particular device, because it occured to me there might be a problem with it. To set a channel at a particular intensity you first send the channel (1 byte), then the intensity (1 byte), however, if the device were to for some reason, miss out a byte, all your intensity values, would be treated as channels, and all your channels would be treated as intensities. This would seriously screw up your show. If you did make some crossfading software, then it would obviously send tens of thousands of updates, so the probability of this occuring by accident is increased. And also if the cable was momentarily disconnected, and reconnected on the wrong beat it would go wrong. Do you reckon this could happen. Has anyone used one of these? I'm sure you are aware the PMX (pulsar multiplex) protocol, (present on clay paky and pulsar fixtures) which uses the serial port, would not suffer from this problem as it uses a protocol where bit 7 indicates if each byte is a channel or intensity - I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ike Posted March 13, 2004 Share Posted March 13, 2004 Just noticed:Connection to the DMX network by standard 3-pin connector :o :huh: :) ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P. Funk Posted March 14, 2004 Share Posted March 14, 2004 it doesnt say "DMX standard 3 pin connector", it says "connects to the DMX network" through a "standard 3 pin connector". 3 pin XLRs are pretty standard - in microphones. ;) I would also be quite interested in any thoughts on this, as I am thinking of getting one as well... maybe the device has an error correction line saying 'if channel > 120 then swap chans/ints' or similar... which would catch it sometimes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomLyall Posted March 14, 2004 Share Posted March 14, 2004 I bought this one from CPC the other week, works quite well, has both a 3 and 5 pin XLR, doesnt have an input/merge :o about £70 I think for the 120 channel version comes with the softwear thats qutie good but its not open source ;) :) :huh: [edit] pm me if you want a copy of the softwear Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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