sound_nerd said:
That interface won't work with
Rosco, or
Martin, or Hog software unless you're really good at programming USB gear. They all have slightly different coding, just enough so you can't use it.
I can't speak for other manufacturers, but it isn't just a matter of being different for difference sake. We support up to 16 universes with a true data update rate of 30 Hz, and a frame update rate as fast as the standard allows.
Many top end consoles use a data update rate of 24 or 25 Hz, but we picked 30 Hz because of the emergence of video and media control. When you use motion generation on, say a Catalyst, Arkaos
DMX, BLAST,
etc., it looks smoother at 30 Hz. A higher data generation rate also has some advantages for some other specialized applications, like
pyro and large frame
laser stuff.
Bottom
line, we looked at a bunch of interfaces before building and couldn't find one that could handle data rates and capacity we wanted. Also, a fair number have significant end-to-end data delay and
driver problems.
We try to price aggressively (to avoid the need for someone to figure out, say, that the "high end" product interfaces with a
visualizer via a memory mapped file...) But we decided that entry
level for us was
DMX in, out, and
SMPTE support (so we could support all features on all interfaces) and no compromising update rates, so we are going to be $100 more than the cheapest possible offering, no matter what volume we can get up to (we just made the jump to building 500 at a time).
-jjf