Pixel net vrs DMX

[Timon]

One thing I'm not totally sure about. Do SSings accept standard DMX or just the Pixelnet version?

To be honest, I've thought that a SS which connected used P-DMX would be very interesting. I like the idea of using the higher voltage and thus less current to supply power to the controller.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[rrowan]

The Smart String Controllers (SSC), SS Hubs are Pixelnet only

Rick R.

[urthegman]

Rick, I'm not looking to be argumentative or to confuse anyone in any way. But in my struggles to get LSP to control Madrix which in turn will control my programmable snow tubes. One of my channels on my first hub was running Madrix effects which are DMX commands the bizarre thing is, I am pulling DMX off of my SECOND hub. It's done it a couple of times but I can't reproduce it on purpose. I would really like to have Madrix control 8 of my flexible strips but I haven't been able to figure out how to make a patch in Madrix that will map out to my Smart string strips. George

[MrChristmas2000]

Higher voltage =   

Might be exciting for a few seconds, but expensive though. 

[rokkett]

urthegman - if the DMX stream had a repeating pattern that included the value 170, I bet the pixelnet hub was just grabbing the DMX values following the 170 beginning of packet marker as channel 1, 2,3, etc values.  If another channel suddenly had the 170 value,, that would restart the packet.  Without filtering out the random beginning of packet markers, the resulting output will be unpredictable.

[rm357]

P-DMX: 24 to 48 volts - none of our stuff is rated for that. You will need a DC-DC converter to get the voltage down to 12v without thowing away the extra voltage as heat.

DMX? The SSC converts pixelnet to the data stream needed for the nodes. There is a document on the wiki that gives the why of pixelnet, but in a nutshell a full DMX universe is only 170 nodes. My current plans are going to use most of a pixelnet universe which is equivalent to 8 DMX universes. If I had to implement my plans using DMX, the mega tree would be a bit of a nightmare with one DMX universe ending about halfway up a string... Either that or limit it to 3 strings per universe and have to have around 12 DMX universes (dongles) to cover everything.

If you really just gotta have the P-DMX, you'll need to design your own SSC which includes the DC-DC converter and the firmware to translate P-DMX into node data.

I really hoping that I'll have an etherdongle in time for Christmas. An etherdongle takes the standard DMX over ethernet protocol and can output either 4 universes of pixelnet (equivalent to 32 universes of DMX) or 4 universes of DMX (each pair in the ethernet cable has a universe on it).

RM