I got a couple of kits from diylightanimation.com through a group buy.
A couple of weeks ago the Lynx Express 16 channel showed up, and this week finally got the SSR4 kit(s).
I bought an old 4 channel scope (nessie) and then just this week got my first real Soldering iron a Weller WES51 - Amazon had the best price and I am a cheap.
I had gotten a couple of boards called a DMX dongle early in the year - but the 48$ price tag for the parts to populate the board has always stopped me, and with a bunch of Arduinos laying around i just thought that I could use one of those - they were microprocessors after all. The dongle just has a usb to RS232 module, a PIC chip and a very authoratative looking crystal oscillator module. I guess DMX has some pretty precise timing needs.
I did some googling and found these articles.
Ethernet DMX - that hooked an Ethernet shield and put out DMX.
Found a piece of code that appears almost everywhere - DMX Shield für Arduino.
On the Arduino Playground they have
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/DMX/Opendmx that looks promising.I Just need the Arduino board to interface the USB to the 485 for dmx - There is pd software to drive the
Since I have an extra set of parts for a second SSR4 kit i will be stealing one of the 485 chips to drive the ssr4 and 16 channel LYNX for a while until i get enough parts together to make another order from mouser.
Tinker.it has some a library on google code that does DMX with and Arduinohttp://groups.google.com/group/dmxsimple/browse_thread/thread/ef8f246371d55c1b
Wouldn't it be kewl to use Adafruit Wave shield and some extra code to sync some amimation code from the same SD card - and drive a smallish Christmas tree or display - Me thinks that this would overload things somewhat - but what the heck - i have all the parts, and lots of time to Investigate (waste) :-)
