Mac based program to control lights

[charles59]

As I started laying out my tools/projects I am doing, I was wondering about setting up a daemon (process) to read in network packets,and then spool them to the proper dongle/universe.  It would let me isolate the serial items from all my other code, and easily support multiple universes.  The network packet would just be wrapper of the DMX packet, with a universe indicator.  I was wondering how useful this type of abstraction would be outside my programming.  Right now I am planning to right the dispatcher in Cocoa (Mac native support), but could see if written in C, it would work on any platform (with a few tweaks for winsock on windows).  Just thinking out loud.

[dowdybrown]

If you are going to take that approach, why not use OLA?

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[charles59]

If I understand that correctly, it is like Art Net, a protocool that is made for the controllers to be ethernet based. That has more to it, since each controller box has to look, respond, etc.  This is quite a bit simplier, the controllers are still straight DMX.  Just a software program in between that and the serial port, looks at the an extra byte, selected the correct serial port based on universe to port assignment, and then sends the dmx packet.

Unless I am misunderstanding the protocool, and it is for something designed to be something not at the controller level.

[dowdybrown]

OLA is not a protocol, think of it more as a translator. It provides a standard API to communicate to a dozen different DMX dongles as well as several different DMX over IP protocols including E1.31 and Artnet. It accomplishes this via a daemon process, just as you propose for your own software. Here is a better link:

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