I always have some problems with starting a new post about a device I built. They always seem to begin similarly. This post, anyways, describes the actions that took place for me building a DMX-to-Kramer converter.
The operation is quite straightforward: You assign a DMX-address to the device and connect it to lighting-desk/ your DMX-infrastructure. Upon receiving certain DMX values the converter sends out data via its serial port. These data being sent out are part of Kramer’s Protocol-2000 command-stack.
This way you can control any Kramer device via DMX.
To keep operation as simple (and secure) as possible I did not implement the complete command-set of Kramer’s Protocol-2000 but only a few commands. In this example I only implemented the commands to change video-output of the Kramer device. Anything else is possible as well, of course.
A very early prototype on a breadboard. Most important stuff (the display…) is already working.
The circuitboard was developed using Fritzing. It was etched at PCBPool. I realized that I forgot to include the capacitors in the second that I unpacked the circuitboard. Afterwards it still took me ~2 hours to realize nothing was working because of those little bastards…
Duct tape and microcontrollers … Story of my life…
The last K2000-Protocol command is always displayed for debugging purposes.
That’s what my desk looks like during those phases.
Coming close to an end…
DMX-In, Serial-Out. DMX-address can esily be changed via the buttons next to the serial port. The next version will probably get some Serial-In as well.
Back side (Front side?)
As I already stated earlier I only implemented video-switching via K2000-Protocol. Switching other aspects (Audio, for example) will just be a minor change in code. It would be possible to completely implement the K2000 protocol but I don’t think this is very sensible since it would probbly increase the chance of totally messing things up during normal operation.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvINrsS7DwI[/tube]
