DMX over wlan with WDS

Short Introduction:

We tried September 2008 the first time to use DMX over Wlan in Klangwolke of Ars Electronica in a professional show - 5 stations, one on a moving boat on the river, the rest with a minimum of 200m and a maximum of 1 km.

To reduce network traffic and for security reasons we decided to take 5 ChamSys MagicQ Consoles with the possibility of wireless remotes - as router we took 5 Buffalo WHR-HP-54G - flashed with DD-WRTv24 and WDS - I tried this two weeks before and had quite good signal between the 1 km (of course we changed the default Antenna to professional Yagis).

After setup nothing worked - WDS did not work at all - our needs are client to client, not client to Internet - the signal quality shown in the webif of DD-WRT was good, but I had no connection between the MagicQ Consoles.

Ok - I changed from WDS to client mode, this worked, but extremely long delays (up to 6 sec), net sometime breaking down .... so what to do, 4 days left to the performance, where at least 30.000 people will come to watch the show.

We found 5 new routers and run it with the original firmware of Buffalo - it worked somehow, delays was much better, but the moves of the movingheads was not smooth and the funny thing - in the night the signal was very good, but as soon as the sun arrievd, the signal was gone - so we decided to used it only for programming in the night and not to run the show, during the show there was an operator on each chamsys - thats the real advantage of wireless remote of MagicQ consoles.

But last week I tried Tomato firmware on the WHR-HP-54G - I could not stop testing. WDS - just three minutes of configuring and it worked - I just called my friend, who programmed the new led facade of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz to pass by and to test the two Buffalo WHR-HP-54G with the standard antennas - the programm run on a laptop with MagicQ with 12 Artnet-Universes and 3 rooms away and 4 walls in between the Wysiwyg simulation.  !!! 12 Universes !!!, on every channel there was all the time a change - no delays and extremly smooth color blends - incredible - I just know, that we get the same signal quality with the Yagi Antennas on 800m - 1 km.

We expanded the 12 channels to 16 and it still was incredible smooth, but you could see that it starts to jump a little bit and the colour changes was not as nice as before - it seems, that 12 universes is the maximum, the cpu can handle in realtime ....