Drivers and software

Advice: If your are looking for a interface to buy, then start with finding your favorite controller app, and find out which drivers and thereby which hardware is supported.

There is a number of ways to get a controller application to send DMX data to a hardware interface (that can send the data out on your DMX wire).

Sometime the driver is split up into:

• Hardware driver for sending raw data to and from the hardware.
• Protocol driver for translating data/instructions between the controller app and the hardware (which uses some kind of protocol).

Most USB interfaces works as a "virtual com port", which means that there is a real com port in the hardware, and a driver makes a com interface available i the operating system. Most USB com ports are supported 'out of the box' on both Windows and Linux (nice!), so most USB-to-DMX interfaces just need a protocol driver (easy to make and use)

On Windows it seems that (almost) all controller apps have their own drivers. Probably because no good framework existed.

On Linux there exists a system for hardware drivers, which is a kernel module with a common interface to the controller software that is independent of which hardware you choose to use. This is called DMX 4 Linux. Many drivers don't need to be in the kernel, and for that, there is a driver framework called LLA.

Remember that it is possible to send DMX data over a network to an other computer or an Ethernet-to-DMX hardware interface. LLA is particularly good at this and in routing the signals between different systems and hardware.