How to control Enttec Open DMX USB via Python?

python python-3.x libusb dmx512
Petja picture Petja · Mar 31, 2013 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

I'm wondering is that possible to control lights connected to Enttec Open DMX USB via Python shell. If it is, how to?

Answer

Pierz picture Pierz · Mar 19, 2014

The Open Lighting Project (formerly known as opendmx) provides a Python API, as part of their Open Lighting Architecture (OLA), for use the OpenDMX USB on OSX and Linux. If you're on Windows then I've not found anything apart from the code from Enttec's website which uses the FTD2XX.DLL libraries.

However it should be noted that one cannot use normal serial based libraries (pyserial etc). Basically OLA either needs to use a special kernel module on Linux, or use the generic FTDI non-serial kernel driver in combination with libftdi on Mac or Linux - for details see their device specific page on the OpenDMX.

The communication and protocols used are completely different from Enttec Pro range (which one can just control using simple serial commands with something like pyserial, though OLA also talks to them too).

Related questions

Convert bytes to a string

I'm using this code to get standard output from an external program: >>> from subprocess import * >>> command_stdout = Popen(['ls', '-l'], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0] The communicate() method returns an array of bytes: >>> …

Read More
Best way to convert string to bytes in Python 3?

There appear to be two different ways to convert a string to bytes, as seen in the answers to TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface Which of these methods would be better or more Pythonic? Or is it …

Read More
How to install pip with Python 3?

I want to install pip. It should support Python 3, but it requires setuptools, which is available only for Python 2. How can I install pip with Python 3?

Read More