flawed premise
I may have mentioned it before, but I'm trying to build my own light board. You see, low end light boards cost hundreds of dollars, mid to high end boards start in the thousands. The little tiny (now defunct) theatre company I was working for couldn't hope to invest in one. I figure I should be able to assemble a finished product for under a hundred bucks, R&D will obviously cost more due to the built in failure rate. Well, I'm at major failure number one.
The platform I chose to be the brain can't talk fast enough to be a DMX controller without a major redesign. The problem is that the chip needs to talk on two serial ports, one to the computer and one to the dimmers. Unfortunately, the chip only has one dedicated serial port, that is wired into USB. The second port can be simulated with a library, but since there is no hardware acceleration it can only work at 9600 baud. Sadly, DMX wants to run at 256,000 baud. Yeah, thats about 25 times faster, can't fudge that.
I can deal with a flawed premise, I just really hate that I already built an adapter to make the damn thing speak DMX, just not fast enough.
The platform I chose to be the brain can't talk fast enough to be a DMX controller without a major redesign. The problem is that the chip needs to talk on two serial ports, one to the computer and one to the dimmers. Unfortunately, the chip only has one dedicated serial port, that is wired into USB. The second port can be simulated with a library, but since there is no hardware acceleration it can only work at 9600 baud. Sadly, DMX wants to run at 256,000 baud. Yeah, thats about 25 times faster, can't fudge that.
I can deal with a flawed premise, I just really hate that I already built an adapter to make the damn thing speak DMX, just not fast enough.