I sure like the system of cascading hubs, smart hubs... passive hubs... 4 pairs of signal running over a single cable... its is so flexible and its made things incredibly easy and flexible as I moved to my new house with a LOT of new road.background: before, I had a pie-shaped lot that had the narrow part facing the street off a culdesac. now, I have a long street along my 4 acre lot and iron fence/gate to the right of the house and wall to the left of the house.
I wanted to use the entire "canvas" and so I have 16 aethers, 9 coroflakes, 24 arches, 3 matrix panels, 15 minitrees, 2 mega trees, and soon -- 1 25ft 5000-pixel megapixel tree in the center.
With the move to nearly all RGB, I also tried to create an easily deployable, and highly water-proof configuration. So, I have 16 battery boxes, each with power supply and controller, and very little cable-to-cable connections out in the yard. my SSC connections are all waterproof 4-core pigtails on the twisted pair, and 3-core pigtails connecting the lights.
everything is cascaded from the data source to the hubs and outward to other hubs and finally the controllers. my DMX is all wireless -- and it works great! the pixelnet carries 4 universes to the outer reaches with a single cable. another set of 4 universes will control the big tree.
last night when hanging the coroflakes I found that they stretched out so far across the property, the original cables that I tested with where simply too short for the layout I wanted. so, I pulled out 2 4-port passive hubs (built 2 years ago and gathering dust) and 2 more battery boxes with power supplies, and extended the universe along the far reaches.
knowing that it would all simply work, relieved me of a LOT of stress. and it did work, that easily!
thanks, RJ for the well-considered design of the system!!
now, if only the quality of the RGB pixels could be solved...