Rick,
Yeah, I was more or less inquiring about the possibility of magically making this work with a new firmware or something, using the existing PCB design. I have no idea what the possibilities are. More wishful thinking than anything
As to the question about how you would tell it what channels to broadcast on the network connection versus the pixelnet connection... I guess you'd have to have some sort of utility to configure that by connecting the etherdongle to your PC first, sort of like how the Smart String utility works. You'd say something like "Channels 1 through 5999 are output via Pixelnet, and channels 6000 through 6680 are output via E1.31". I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than that, but the general idea is there.
And yeah, this wouldn't play well (or at all) with the slave units. But since the conductor/etherdongle combo can spit out bits on that network port, it seems like it might be possible for it to spit out even more bits on that port in the form of formatted E1.31 packets.
Again, this is more just wishful thinking. I'm fully expecting to go the route that caretaker described, and I'm sure it will work great. I used LSP last year, and had a few issues until I used xLights to run the show. It ran flawlessly after that.
I'd like to thank RJ for all the hard work that has gone into the Etherdongle.
I just got mine in the mail today, and I'm very excited to get started on it and see what it can do!