Inexperienced with electronics and Arduino, but have learned a bit in the past few weeks and feel the tutorials would allow me to complete this.
I want to create DMX slaves so that I can trigger motors, lights, smoke, from vixen software. I will use a retail Arduino with a DMX master circuit run into the computer with usb. Can I make the slaves with a hackduino or do they need the serial chip that the retail versions have? Wouldn't it then be more cost effective to buy retail arduino's for the slave units and attach the DMX circuit to them if the hackduino wouldn't work?
I will use a retail Arduino with a DMX master circuit run into the computer with usb.
I'm not really sure if you can do that... Of course you can upload your DMX sketch from USB and run a pre-programmed sequence, but I'm not sure if you can "run the show" from the computer that way. You might need a "retail" USB-DMX controller...
Can I make the slaves with a hackduino or do they need the serial chip that the retail versions have? Wouldn't it then be more cost effective to buy retail arduino's for the slave units and attach the DMX circuit to them if the hackduino wouldn't work?
I don't know anything about the hackduino, but for DMX you need a special RS-485 chip/circuit in either case.
If you don't already have some DMX equipment, I suggest you get a DMX light (or something) so that when you have trouble, you can use the good equipment to determine if the trouble is on the master/controller side or the device/slave side. Or, you might end-up building something that you think is DMX, that doesn't work with any other DMX hardware.
I will use a retail Arduino with a DMX master circuit run into the computer with usb.
I'm not really sure if you can do that... Of course you can upload your DMX sketch from USB and run a pre-programmed sequence, but I'm not sure if you can "run the show" from the computer that way. You might need a "retail" USB-DMX controller...
Thanks for all the responses. I have it working so far in that it goes from the vixen software, through an entec driver, and into the Arduino Uno as per the playground tutorials. The receive light on the Arduino lights up when I test the channels or put commands in any channel so it definitely works to setup shows and use the Arduino as a DMX master.
Before I buy the Texas Instruments chips to actually encode and decode between Arduinos, I wanted to be sure because all the tutorials on the playground show the boards as a shield on a full retail Arduino, not a microcontroller only model. I suppose the microcontroller only model that you build yourself is only useful if it is going to be a standalone device and won't need external communication? Is this right?
