My USB Dongles are built and all works in LSP (set up details)

[peteandvanessa]

Thanks to one of the kind users here, I managed to get two USB (Version 2) Dongles.

I built both on Saturday and both worked first time (got the satisfying bing bong sound when they were plugged into the USB ports).

I noted down the Comms ports from device manager.

The rest of Saturday saw me wrestling with Light Show Pro settings.

For the life of me I couldn't get it to "talk" to the USB dongles. It always reported that Comms port access denied

Slept on it overnight and then realized what the issue was.

In LSP, using the USB dongles, I realized that only two USB dongles should appear.

What I was doing was dragging 16 PixelNet controllers, assigning each of them a controller number starting at 1 and ending at 16 (for the sixteen LED flex strips)
Then when I hit "output to the lights" LSP said that the comms port access was denied.

Then I figured out why.

First you must flash the Smart String controllers with the firmware (you DONT need to short the program pins on the smart string controller)
Link here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Then you need to use the Smart string utility to connect to the smart string (You DO need to short the program pins on the smart string controller to set their start and end address)
Link here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

The first controller I set to address 1 (which will be the same in LSP)

Then you need to tell the Smart string controller how many nodes there are on that string, what type of string, and direction (forwards or backwards) (in my case LED Flex strip).
In my case it was 120 nodes (or 360 channels), then send the infor by hitting transmit

The LED Flex strip would then flash all white on all the nodes in that strip.

Then power the strings down, and remove the program jumper.

Next move to your second Smart String strip and again using the Smart string utility, short the program pin, but this time when it asks for the starting channel, set it to channel 361. If yours is 120 notes like mine, the utility will set the strings starting channel at 360 and end channel 720, then hit the transmit button again.
All should flash white again.

The "unshort" the program pin

Then connect the USB dongle to your PC
Then the cable from the dongle goes to the PixelNet 16 port active Hub (plug into the PixelNet input)

Then the ethernet from the Smart String Output goes to the Smart String Controller.

And power everything up.

That's your first LED Flexstrip done!

Then carry on with all your other strings (you can just keep going on numbering beyong 4096, but you will need two USB dongles, the second usb dongle will start at 4097 and you will need a second PixelNet Active Hub.

With the USB dongles (I'm using 2 dongles), only two should appear (and be set up in the output set up in LSP), one for USB dongle 1 and one for USB dongle 2

Then you need to go into the sixteen controllers that have been dropped into the LSP sequencing s/w and assign then either to comms port number for USB dongle 1 or USB dongle 2. That stops the issue of LSP reporting that the comms port access was denied.

Now the next bit took me a while to work out, and it's isn't intuitive.

What you do next is to go to your first controller, right click on it in the sequence and select "set up controller".

In my case my first controller is connected to a 120 node flexible LED strip, so there are 120 nodes, which had 120 x 3 channels = 360 channels.

So on that controller, I assigned it to USB dongle 1, and then when setting up the controller you ALSO need to click on the channel section.

In the channel section, click on renumber channel and set the first channel to 1 and click ok.

LSP will then renumber the first channel as 1 and the last channel as 360.

Then I moved onto my next 120 node flexible LED strip.

Again, assign this second controller to the USB Dongle number one (remember each USB dongle can address 4096 channels)

Then go back into the second controller and go back into the channel section and click on the channel renumber section.

Now assign the first channel for controller 2 as channel 361, LSP will then assign channel numbers from 361 to 720.

Carry on assigning you controllers / channel numbers untill you reach 4096.

When you reach 4096, the next controllers will need to be assigned to USB Dongle number 2 (starting channel address will then need to be set at 1 until you reach the next 4096 channels)

After all this was set up as above.

All my 16 flex strips blinky flash 

[pk]

Congratulations on getting everything running.  Welcome to the world of blinky flashy.