Gilderfluke&Co Mp3-50 Audio & Show Controllers - Manual (Page 19)

DMX-512 is normally used with the ‘RS-422’ position. MIDI will only
work in the ‘optoisolated’ position. The Net Serial or IR Trigger
modes are normally used in the ‘RS-422’ position, but will actually
work in either position.
If you need to optically isolate the signal, but feed multiple
Mp3-50/8 or Mp3-50/40, you can use a single Mp3-50/8 or
Mp3-50/40 as an isolator/buffer: The external signal can be fed
into one of the ‘optoisolated’ DMX/MIDI inputs on any one Mp3-
50/8 or Mp3-50/40, and the other units fed in parallel from the
DMX/MIDI output from that first unit. All of these other ‘down-
stream’ Mp3-50/8s or Mp3-50/40s should have their inputs set for
RS-422.
This connection has five possible modes of operation. These
are selected through the ‘Mp3 Configurator’ program.
a) DMX-512: The switch on the bottom of the Mp3-50 should
be in the RS-422/High-z position to be used for DMX-512.
The Mp3-50/8 or Mp3-50/40 will stop playing any shows
from the onboard flash memory as soon as valid DMX-512
signal is received.
The DMX-512 standard was developed by the United
States Institute for Theatrical Technology (USITT) for a high
speed (250 KBaud) asynchronous serial data link. Although it
was originally designed for controlling light dimmers, it is
now supported by hundreds of suppliers throughout the
world for controlling all kinds of theatrical equipment.
Even though the DMX-512 standard calls for 512 chan-
nels of data, the DMX-512 transmission from PC•MACs is
limited to 256 eight-bit wide channels. If you have enabled
the DMX-512 checksum, you can address your DMX-512
compatible output devices to respond to any address be-
tween 0 and 255. Addresses above the 256th are used in
PC•MACs for transmitting a checksum. The Mp3-50/8 or
Mp3-50/40 can use this to verify that the data received
from PC•MACs has no transmission errors in it. If you ad-
dress a light dimmer or other DMX-512 device to addresses
256 or 257, you will see this verification data displayed as a
flickering pattern.
If you have NOT selected DMX-512 checksums, the
‘Mp3 Configurator’ will allow you to set the addresses for
DMX-512 to any address from 1 through 512. Address ‘1’ is
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