xLights Entec OpenDMX USB dongle on a Macbook

Hi all,

I am new to this forum, but have been using LOR on a windows laptop for 10+ years. Long story short, but I want to transfer my show design and control to a Macbook. I stumbled across xLights and have been playing around with it for about a month. I have a LOR USB to 485 converter, and an Entec DMX Open USB box. They are connected via a USB-c dongle. The LOR USB to 485 connects to 3 16 channel controllers, and the Entec connects to a DMX universe with DMX boards controlling RGB LED strips.

I have managed to get xLights to connect to the LOR controller and control lights in the test window, but I for the life of me cannot get the Entec dongle to communicate with the DMX board on the Macbook version of xLights. The status lights on the DMX board do not signal communication with the computer. To verify the controller is working on the Mac I installed QLC+ and managed to get that to detect and communicate with the DMX board. I then backtracked to the old windows laptop and with xLights on that I managed to get xLights to communicate with the DMX board, so it appears the issue lies in the Mac version of Xlights?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers

I don't think Mac xLights has ever worked with USB dongles, best find some other way.

I would strongly suggest getting FPP up and running on a Pi (or similar) and get the dongle working there. Since you won't be running your show from the MacBook (no scheduler), it is very low priority to get the dongle working on the Mac. Making sure it works with FPP it the important step. You can run FPP as a bridge (using DDP or e1.31) so output to lights from xLights will work.

There's open dmx drivers for the mac at https://ftdichip.com/drivers/d2xx-drivers/ and https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/. No idea if xlights on the mac will drive the dongle with the correct driver or not.

dkulp said:

I would strongly suggest getting FPP up and running on a Pi (or similar) and get the dongle working there. Since you won't be running your show from the MacBook (no scheduler), it is very low priority to get the dongle working on the Mac. Making sure it works with FPP it the important step. You can run FPP as a bridge (using DDP or e1.31) so output to lights from xLights will work.

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Cool, thanks for the redirect! I was gifted a Pi 3B A few years ago and its just been collecting dust, so I will go down the rabbit hole of getting that up and running with FPP. In my 5 mins of googling people seem to think anything over a Pi 2 should suffice unless you got an out of control setup. I’ve only got about 20 sets of lights connected to the LOR controller, and about 25 LED strings on the DMX universe.