uDMX - tiny bus powered USB-DMX interface


Probably the smallest USB-DMX Interface in the world….

News

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uDMX 1.2 released !!
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Features

Downloads

Contributions

Below are contributions by some uDMX makers/users. We couldn’t test everything - your feedback is welcome.

Version History

Warning

Building and using uDMX is AT YOUR OWN RISK.
uDMX draws all its power from the host computer’s USB bus and the DMX and USB lines aren’t galvanically isolated. It may destroy your computer, or worse…
Use at your own risk or don’t use it at all!
And read the license…

License

uDMX is © 2006 [ a n y m a ] - Max & Michael Egger
AVR-USB - firmware-Only USB driver is © Objective Development

Schematics and software are licensed under GNU GPL 2.0;
you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

uDMX is released in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this document; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.
http://www.gnu.org

Hardware

uDMX is built around a ATMEL ATMega8 microcontroller, very few external parts are used, thanks to Objective Developments firmware only usb driver.
We went for the surface mounted version to keep it as small as possible. It’s a bit a pain to solder by hand, but feasible with lots of patience and not too many drinks the night before.

Very few pins are needed, but unfortunately smaller AVRs don’t have enough SRAM (we need 512 bytes already to buffer the DMX channels) so we have to use at least a Mega8…
The Mega8 is overclocked at 12Mhz, as needed by the usb driver. We power the RS485 transciever directly from the usb bus - it might be a better idea to put in a dc/dc converter and there should be some overvoltage protection.
Ben Suffolk shows how it could be done with his bus powered USB-DMX Interface

There is a 5pin XLR connector for the DMX and the cable of a dead mouse wired directly to the board for USB. D+ is connected to INT0 and is used by the usb-driver, D- on INT1 permits to check regularly if the usb bus is still alive, put the processor into powersave mode when its not, and wake it up again on any bus activity.

Software

There are three pieces of software:

The command line utility is tested under MacOS X 10.4 and Linux, it should compile under Windows as well
Max/MSP binaries are MacOS X only
See the downloadable archive for the commented source code and binaries

To compile the firmware you’ll need avr-libc (see here how to do this on a macintosh)
To compile the Max external you’ll need the MAX/MSP Software Development Kit
and both the Max external and the commandline tool depend on libusb - open source usb library. For MacOS X, the guys over at www.ellert.se have made handy installer packages for libusb, browse their downloads for the most recent package: http://www.ellert.se/PKGS/

uDMX comes with a handy external object for Max/MSP to control dimmers or other DMX equipment directly from Max/MSP:

Comments

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  1. […] This is the version 1.0 documentation. See the uDMX Homepage for updates […]

    Pingback by [ a n y m a ] - uDMX - version 1.0 released — 2006-06-12 @ 10.42 pm

  2. […] See the uDMX Homepage for updates […]

    Pingback by [ a n y m a ] - uDMX - version 0.9 released — 2006-06-12 @ 10.43 pm

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