EthConGateway - LSP/Vixen/DMX/Renard

Woohooo!!!

My Box of bits for the ECG arrived today, nice and safe. Sadly I won't be able to start playing until the weekend. :'(

I can't wait :D

Dave
 
Got my ECG up and running, both with Vixen and LSP. Due to Ed's excellent tutorial, I finally had to resort to getting Vixen configured on my laptop to test the ECG and some DMX controllers. After playing with the plug-in setup, and listening closely to all of Ed's instructions, I got it to work first with Vixen. I then took that knowledge, and got LSP to work - at least some of the time.

But the ECG works great on 2 slaves right now, and more later....
 
My EthConGateway Package arrived yesterday. Unpacked and started to solder. Finished today at 2-00pm
Powered up and tested the slave Board
All OK programmed the Slave Pics. Plugged in the master board and no leds on the Master board were lit.
Unpluged the master board and applied power to it, Leds came on
Checked board and found a solder bridge between the ground pins and 3.3V. Removed Solder bridge.
Plugged Master board in and all ok

Setup vixen and EthConGateway using the great tutorials and was able to see the the leds on the slave board react.
I found the Build instruction easy to follow except for the mislabeled Caps. Luckly I had read the forums and this issue had already been discussed. Yes there were some Caps and resistors missing, once again issue hilited in forums. Will wait for those to show up.
So I have a 6 slave EthConGateway Working with Vixen and LSP.

Now I really have to complete the show for this Xmas

Thanks for the Great Tutorials as well

Tiger DMX120, Spi Bridge and strobes to build and test. 88 day to Lights Turn On..

Regards Jeff Rae.
 
I've now built my ECG, bar the missing couple of components but no problem with that. ;)

I still have to Program the PICS and connect to Vixen & LSP.

Great job Ed and the gang at J1Sys for an easy to build board.

Only thing I would have liked to see in the instructions, was a component summary, eg if I want to find what component fits in RR83, I could just look at the list, rather than have to search the whole document. But that is fine considering the instructions are still a work in Progress.

I can't wait to put my ECG to use.

Cheers
Dave
 
Built my DMXREN-8 this weekend as well. No new issues to report - it went pretty much as the instructions said it would!

I can hit it from my PC - now to work on configuring the plugins and seeing what comes out!

So much potential... fun times.

Tim
 
A BIG OOPS!!!!

(I don't mean Object Oriented Programming System)

The published hex file for the ECG-DMXRen8 was invalid. Not sure what happened, it was just plain bad!!

A new file has been published on our site this morning. Please visit www.j1sys.com and go to the product page for DMXRen8 and you should find a new hex file available. We have also published the MPLAB checksum for the file to help verify that you have downloaded and imported it correctly. It should be the same number in the standalone programming software but we haven't tested it.

I found one other idiosyncrasy of the DMXRen8 that you should know about. After programming my slaves with the proper hex code I left my ICD3 connected to the last slave and then powered down and powered back up the DMXRen8. The slave I was attached to did not initialize properly and was therefore not available to receive data. I scratched my head and tried several different things and then discovered the error. The ICD3 senses the power up and then does another reboot of the slave it is attached to (so it can check the processor ID etc). This second reboot causes the slave to not be available to report in when the master does a roll-call of all slaves present. Therefore it never receives any data.

So please remove your PIC programmer from all slaves before operating the unit.

Sorry for the confusion on the HEX.

-Ed
 
one clarification -

If your DMXRen8 is working (sending data to DMX or Renard units), LEAVE IT ALONE!!

Some people are reporting success with the old hex code. We will investigate further.

A new release, with some new features, should clear all this up for everyone.

-Ed
 
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