Newsgroups: rec.arts.theatre.stagecraft
Subject: Re: DMX512 Over Ethernet
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Tim Mitchell  writes:

> In article <[email protected]>, Iain
> Buchanan  writes
> >Is there anything or any companies that do this...
> >
> >We use a laptop with a built in 10/100 ethernet card, however all the
> >quotes we've had to transmit DMX over an existing ethernet network
> >require some kind of interpretor or dongle that plugs into either the
> >serial or parallel ports then sends the packets over eth.
> >
> >This is crazy, isn't there anyway to trasmit the packets straight from
> >the Laptop Network card, bypassing the need for a dongle???
> 
> Ask Artistic Licence, www.artisticlicence.com, they make lots of
> specialist ethernet/DMX stuff.
> 
> I have not heard of anything like this. Probably it is a lot easier to
> design a complete system of hardware and software than to create a
> software driver for an existing proprietary ethernet card. 

Why would this kind of system need a special Ethenret drivers ?
All marjo operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.) have
ethernet card drivers (wither built-in or provided by card manufacturer).
Those drivers provide a generalized API which looks practically
same for all Ethernet cards. All communication programs or communciation
protocol stacs which use Ethernet are the interface usgn that API.
So if you use that API you write a program for one card properly, it will
work nicely with practically any Ethernet card you can find for which
there are workign drivers for the operating system you are working with.

-- 
Tomi Engdahl (http://www.iki.fi/then/)
Take a look at my electronics web links and documents at 
http://www.epanorama.net/