DIY DMX dongles and OLA

[ptone]

I've seen mentioned that the many of the DIY dongles available are near clones of the enttec dmx usb pro.

Does that mean they are also compatible with the OSA libraries, or is there some USB vendor ID that the library checks to determine device?

-Preston

[n1ist]

Most DIY dongles only support a subset of the Enttec command sequences, and are limited to only sending a full universe. As for UID/VID, they both show up as FTDI. I'm not sure that will affect compatibility.
/mike

[Entropy]

I've seen mentioned that the many of the DIY dongles available are near clones of the enttec dmx usb pro.

Does that mean they are also compatible with the OSA libraries, or is there some USB vendor ID that the library checks to determine device?

-Preston

Most software like OLA attempts to detect Enttec Pros by doing the following:
1) Look for FTDI devices
2) Send a firmware version request to the device.

RPM's dongles break at step 2) unless you patch OLA since they don't implement the firmware version request message. The patch is somewhere on these forums and came from the OLA author (nomis52).

[nomis52]

I got together with a bunch of the other dongle manufacturers and came up with the USB Protocol Extensions (http://opendmx.net/index.php/USB_Protocol_Extensions)

If the device implements the two new message types then OLA can be updated to know which functionality the device supports.