adopt OLA for DMX

[ptone]

I know E1.31 support is planned, but I'm going to lobby for xlights to adopt and use OLA for its DMX control.

OLA was built just for this kind of use,  supports much more DMX hardware, and would allow xlight dev time to go towards other features.

Now there are two areas where xlights can give back to OLA - there is work to be done to get OLA working on windows - and OLA currently only recognizes commercial USB dongles not DIY.

Since my only interface is E1.31 - I can not use xlights currently.  Anyway, Simon, lead developer at OLA is awesome and responsive and the library seems really well put together - it would be great to see those wheels not reinvented unnecessarily in xlights.

-Preston

[dowdybrown]

I looked at OLA before writing xLights. The lack of Windows support was a killer in my view. Now that xLights is written, the output code is all integrated. There is not a separate internal API for DMX, or Renard, or LOR. You tell channel 123 to twinkle for 5 seconds and the API handles it from there, regardless of the network protocol. So if xLights moved to OLA, then we would have to reduce the scope of xLights to DMX protocol only.

Matt

[dowdybrown]

So if xLights moved to OLA, then we would have to reduce the scope of xLights to DMX protocol only.

After thinking about it some more, I don't think the statement above is true. It should be possible to make OLA an output choice, just like DMX, Renard, and LOR are choices today. However, my first attempt at E1.31 support will be to code it using the native wxWidgets datagram class. That way, we will have E1.31 support  for all platforms.

Matt