Teensy 3.6 - OctoWS2811 - DMX receiver?

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cheolum

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Good Afternoon,

a while back I did a small project with a few WS2812 led strips, the OctoWS2811 board and a IR-Remote.
All the animations were "rendered" on the Teensy and I could control the animation a bit by changing some variables over the IR-Remote. (like speed and color change rate)

Now for another project I would like to use an inexpensive light controller like the Cameo Control 6 instead of the IR-Remote to control the animations.

In my understanding these controllers are just a bunch of potentiometers which signals are bundled and sent out thorugh the DMX cable/protocol.
All I like to do is to read out the value of each of the six potentiometers and represent them in a variable inside my sketch.

I googled a few hours and I found plenty of information on DMX receivers but I could not find an easy solution.

I read here on the forum that Ward has done a pretty good DMX receiver library on the following thread:
https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/1966...re-functionality?p=24993&viewfull=1#post24993

When I have a look at the code it seems that the Arduino would receive the data over the serial interface.

My questions now:

- Is there an adapter board for a teensy 3.6 where I can plug in the DMX cable and get the serial output onto my teensy?
- Will this library somehow interfere with the OctoWS2811 library? (interrupts etc.) The timing on the WS2812 strips seems to be tight….
- Is there an easier way to get access to the potentiometer values on the DMX controller?
o I already thought of take the controller apart and hard wire the potentiometers directly to the teensy, but that would be a mess.
- Do I miss something here? Normally I am able to google the things up for myself but that DMX stuff just seems like not wanting to go into my head ):

Thanks a lot and kind regards
 
I found a solution by myself that works quiet well, see the following (ugly) MS Paint Schematics... :)

Parts used:
Logic Level Converter 5V to 3.3V https://www.digikey.ch/product-detail/en/sparkfun-electronics/BOB-12009/1568-1209-ND/5673795
Arduino DMX Shield https://www.digikey.com/products/en?mpart=DFR0260&v=1738

I use the TeensyDMX library which can be found here: https://github.com/chrisstaite/TeensyDmx

Schematics.jpg

Edit: Oh as a sidenote, i spent around 3 hours trying to get it working till i realized that both TX and RX must be connected to the teensy otherwise it would not work (;

You can see my jumper positions in Red on the DMX Shield.
 

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The RS-485 backpack also works pretty well for this (search this forum for “teensy backpacks”). I soldered a 3-pin female JST connector to a 5-pin DMX connector and it works great. There’s no level-shifter required. An alternative library (I wrote it and I believe it’s simple to use, with lots of examples) is: https://github.com/ssilverman/TeensyDMX

Here’s what it looks like (the forum, at least on my iPhone, rotates the image, so, in your minds, rotate it 90° clockwise if this happens to you; tapping on it makes it appear correct):
D346E52F-49B7-48C9-B93F-0947B6BE67EF.jpeg

I believe that the backpack will also work with a Teensy 3.6 because the "front" pinouts are the same as a Teensy 3.2 and Teensy-LC (pictured).
 
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