No slides, it was an open discussion.
Major points:
The LE has been commercialized after near universal support from the DLA community. Minleon is the vendor and the product will soon (very soon!) be available. As discussed last year, the product will not have wireless support, it uses surface mount technology, and it has only a single 110v connection (not the 2x from LE).
To support the "Minleon Express" there is need for a USB DMX dongle. Again, with the support from the attendees RJ plans to make the Lynx dongle available to Minleon as another commercial product.
There are NO other plans to commercialize other Lynx kits. Minleon has its own smart string solution (high end) and needed a DMX, 110v solution to fill a hole in their product line.
Going forward with the DLA community...
RJ wants to handoff pieces of the web site administration and coop system to others in the community. This NOT an indication of RJ pulling back, instead he wants to use the new time for new development. (He is also working on a new personal project -- getting his own solar system running so that he can get his home off the power grid.
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RJ is looking for candidates to become the "Coop Director" for DLA. This person will be responsible for bringing new coop managers into the fold, determining what will coop and when, and overseeing the coop process.
RJ is also looking for administrators experienced with web site support. Folks with experience in the Wiki software, the forum software, in backups, in permissions, etc. should contact RJ about helping in this role.
RJ talked about kits in his Zeus presentation, not in the future of DLA discussion. In the Zeus presentation RJ talked about the Zeus "architecture"... a low-cost alternative to the hub and SSCs. The SSCs still have a place, but they were also used to create the solution and work out issues before putting it into a monolithic board. Zeus can easily be scaled -- first for 8 strings and 16 strings. But it could easily scale upward (32 strings) or downward (4 strings?) with minimal development and testing. Interest in the 8-string kit will help gauge interest in multiple kit types.
There was also a mention of a Pixelnet to DMX converter developed by a DLA member. It connects to a smart string hub (active of passive) through an existing SSC jack and converts to one of the 8 blocks of addresses to 512 DMX channels. The block is user-selectable, and with 8 of the kits, you can convert all 4096 pixelnet channels from a hub to DMX channels. This kit will be available in a coop very soon.
