F48 and AC Lighting Controller Issues

[adoonan]

Just getting up and running in the pixel world, but I'm trying to use my AC controllers from past years (from a local company called Animated Lighting) to run some perimeter lights, my neighbor's house, and the island in our cul-de-sac.

I've hooked up the data input on my AC controller to serial port 2 on the F48. The jumper pins on the F48 are set to DMX (these controllers aren't LOR protocol). The DMX address wheels on my AC controllers are set to 0,9. On my serial outputs in the F48 interface, I set the output to serial data, DMX type, universe 1, and start address 129 (which I think is the appropriate start address for the address wheels on 0,9).

When I try test mode on the F48, however, nothing happens. The AC controller is powered, up but does not appear to be receiving data. The result is the same when running a sequence from FPP. I think it has something to do with the universe or start address assigned on the F48 interface and the address wheels on the AC controller, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get it to work.

I included a couple of screening shots of the left 48 interface and the settings on xLights.

Any help is much appreciated!

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[JonB256]

It has been a long time since anybody has talked about Animated Lighting controllers. They originally used a very proprietary protocol (not LOR, nor DMX). I had heard they released new firmware to accept DMX but you'll need to research that. (or someone here may know)

[adoonan]

If the DMX protocol is proprietary, that would make sense given the difficulties I'm having. The controller I'm trying is an older version. I'll try a newer one to see if the firmware is the problem.

Do the settings on my F48 at least appear correct to you?

[JonB256]

I don't start a DMX universe at 129. I always start at 1 or 513 or 1025 (keep adding 512)

When you start a DMX universe at a "non-512" number, then what your xlights setup thinks is 129 actually gets treated as channel 1 (because it starts over).

[adoonan]

I don't start a DMX universe at 129. I always start at 1 or 513 or 1025 (keep adding 512)

When you start a DMX universe at a "non-512" number, then what your xlights setup thinks is 129 actually gets treated as channel 1 (because it starts over).
I

I think that I'm confused then. My AC controller has 2 wheels that were set at 0,1 and 0,7 with my Animated Lighting setup (not sure why those were chosen by the company).


When I set up my Serial Outputs on the F48, I did universe 1 and start address 129, which I thought would be the correct setting for when I set my AC controller wheels to 0,9 (which I chose to try to not overlap with any pixel universes). It sounds like I'm off base here.

If I set my Serial Outputs on the F48 to Universe 1 and start address 1, would that mean I'd set my AC controller wheels to 0,1 and everything should work?

[ybjr38@yahoo.com]

I believe those are to identify which unit ID for the AC  light controller.  LOR uses 01 and on.  If you had a wheel version it would probably be the same as an older LOR controller.  I use a LOR AC light control on serial port 2 set on unit one and it uses all 16 channels on the controller.  You may want to  check and see if that is the same as your wheels and it is actually the unit ID for the controlled and not the channel # that  you are looking at.