Looking for major advice for a MAJOR show

[TANSA]

What can I say.
Being and Electrical Engineer means you know theories and still have a lot to learn about electrical.
I am a sparky of 30+ years and do PLC, Dynalite Automation, and work on everything from 1.5VDC to 24000VAC, boats, CCTV, wireless Ethernet, cars, houses, factories, electric just about anything, and I am still learning.
I OZ and Electrical Engineer cannot do Electrical work but an Electrician has to do know Engineering work and gets paid less
Enjoy learning

 

[AAH]

I used LOR for years and was a big exponent of it for its stability and ease of use. It is however primitive compared to the features Xlights has.
If you can avoid using AC lights then DC dimmers are a helluva lot cheaper as well as being safer as you're not working with 110V. There's probably a 2:1 difference in price between AC and DC controllers if you stick with LOR. If you change to Chinese DMX boards (or mine) then you can easily go to at least a 3 to 4 to 1 reduction in price per channel.
Stay away from wifi controlled pixel controllers if you can help it. It's an almost universal thing that you will have problems with lag and glitches when using wifi pixel controllers.
The LOR network uses RS485 and it's fairly slow and very limited in the number of channel per dongle or E1.31 to DMX/LOR bridge. E1.31 or 1 of the other ethernet based protocols is definitely the way to go. The only real issue with this is the maximum distance between ethernet devices being 100m. This means you'd have to bang in a router or switch every 100m if you have a long way to go.
Talk in person to someone who has non LOR pixel and DMX controllers before you commit to anything. What seems easy using LOR is actually quite often even easier with other software and hardware. Getting to 1 of the expos is well worth your trouble.

 

[Kitman]

So essentially you have a computer running the show connected to a master Pi controller that tells every "slave" Pi controller what to do. This reduces lag because then you have all your sub pi controllers going back to a main unit. I understand this, but where do I find these "master" pi controllers vs "slave" pi controllers. I'm still thoroughly reading Falcon's website but what products/product numbers are the "master" controllers versus just "slave"

I just wanted to clear up the Master and Slave thing for you since I run my show with 1 Master Pi and 5 slave Pi's. You have a Raspberry Pi that has FPP installed on it, this is the computer that runs your show, you don't have a computer connected to the Master Pi this is the computer. Then you have as many Slave Pi's as you require, again you install FPP on those, the difference is you set them as a slave and the Master controls them, you don't need to buy a master and slave pi's you just buy as many raspberry pi's as you need, install FPP on all of them and then configure them as Master or Slave.

I hope that helps to clear up the Master and Slave Pi thing a bit.

 

[johnson8ryley]

You guys are awesome! Thanks so much for the advice.
At this point I'm slightly overwhelmed with the options available on the market.

The amount of products out there is insane and overwhelming. I love the idea of simply using master pi's, arduino's etc but I also want something reliable and a little more commercial grade. I'll definitely need to do more research but you guys have been great so far. I just hope it works out for me and the owner. I know I can do it with how little he's doing this year, I just hope he's willing to invest in the higher quality products.

He also seemed skeptical running cat5 everywhere all over the farm. They'll have 1000+ attendees on the weekends during halloween and he's afraid punk middle or high school kids will jack with the cables. I mentioned wifi pixel extenders were an option but admitted that I had read they can become buggy, laggy, etc. So that's another ball game is figuring out how to run cat5 everywhere above ground without some dumb kids messing with it.

 

[Mark_M]

In terms of your question; Yes, DMX alone [in XLR/single universe per cable] is faster because you're only doing a maximum of 512 channels. It will still be faster than E.131/sACN and/or artNET.

Now that I've received a notification from this thread [one year later], I thought I'd address to this lovely statement I made which bugs me....

It is true that more data being sent will take longer.
At the time I said this I left out one factor; because it's a DMX 512 protocol sent over ethernet it's designed to have the same speed.


Now that's off my chest I can go back to more recent threads.