Not being a PC user, I'm going to be doing a little extra work to get SS up and running. Originally, I was going to just wait for the PixelNet Dongle since E1.31 is something I have working now, but without knowing when that might become available, I decided to go ahead and get a couple Lynx dongles ordered in the current coop.
In doing some preparatory research (I'm using the Python programming language), looks like I should be able to address the dongle in one of several ways. There is a libftdi project out there (with python bindings) which is a library to talk directing to the FTDI chip in the dongle - this would not require any driver, as it communicates direct over USB. The other option is to use the Virtual Com port driver (which is cross-platform) and use the pyserial library. So I hope to be providing another way to communicating with PixelNet hardware.
My questions:
Is there any chance that the source code to the current plugins (Vixen, LSP) could be made available as sample code.
It is not clear from the spec, whether it is possible to get higher refresh rates by sending less than the full 4096 channel/bytes of data. Does the hardware just look for the 170 marker byte, or does it also count out to a full packet?
I've used this approach to get some experimentally high refresh rates out of DMX - by limiting the Universe to 128 channels instead of 512. What is the refresh rate limit of the pixel string protocol itself?
-P