Wireless DMX without spending a fortune?

[JeroenE]

In our living room we have several wooden beams on the ceiling (they are functional and can't be removed). When we started redoing the living room we were clever enough to create new electricity pipes with 220V to all the beams. At that time we were planning on putting "regular" lighting on the beams with a few Xanura modules to turn them on or off.

In the mean time we saw some LED RGB strips and as a "proof of concept" we bought a few strips and a Lanbox-LCE DMX-controller to control them. This works great btw, the lanbox is a nifty little box!

The main drawback is the fact that we don't have any spare pipes to the beams so we can't "hide" the extra DMX cables. As we don't like many cables criss-crossing on the ceiling we are looking for a way to prevent this. Because the walls in the living room are already finished we can't put new pipes in the wall. Actually, we can do that of course, but then we'd have to redo the whole room again. This we like to prevent as well. So wireless seems the only way to go.

We thought about a lanbox per beam but that is expensive. We saw a few wireless DMX transmitters but these were rather expensive too (like US$800 for a transmitter and US$500 per receiver) or if they were cheaper the signal rate was very low (meaning that dimming smoothly doesn't work).

I know DMX is mainly used in the "professional" world where perhaps several hunderd euro's per appliance is not much, but as we need at least 6 receivers and a transmitter this is a bit out of budget for us.

Does anyone have a great website which I couldn't find or should we learn to live with a few cables on the ceiling?

[Chiel]

Do you use the 220V wiring in the pipe?

[JeroenE]

Currently not because nothing is connected yet, but we need those cables to power the ledstrips.
We have Neutral, Live and a black switch wire at every beam. Those are all connected to each other so the black wire may be used to switch every thing at once. We weren't sure we were going to need this, but because we can't put any more cables in now (because of junction boxes in the wall) we put the black on in anyway.

[Lennart]

Hi Jeroen,

Is it possible to run at least two UTP cables through the pipes instead of 230V wiring? If so, you can run DMX in and DMX out through one UTP cable and use the second one for 12V/24V/RGB+ground powering of the leds (whatever is needed). It will require you to put the Lanbox and a large enough power supply somewhere out of sight near the junction boxes, but that should be doable (behind a curtain or so?). (This will require opening the junction boxes in the walls but that's more local than redoing the whole wall in case of running new pipes.)

Another option would be to use the affordable DMX over Zigbee solution as discussed here, but as you said, the refresh rate is (too) low (2 or 3 times per second): http://www.domoticaforum.eu/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=637

Lennart

[Chiel]

Exact what i thought of Lennart, take out the 2.5q's, a smaller cable (like utp) should be enough.
If you place the controllers at the other end of the cable, only 4 wires will do the trick.

[JeroenE]

Unfortunately it's not possible to redo the wiring. Because we have more beams than wall outlets not every beam is connected to their own wall outlet. Therefore we have made a few junction boxes in the wall.

Those have been plastered over, glass fabric wallpaper (is that the correct translation for glasvliesbehang ?) put on and then painted. So there is no way to reach the junction boxes without having to redo the entire wall.

Besides that we made them using flexible electric pipe and that doesn't work that well if you want to redo the wiring because it's a PITA to pull the cables through.

[Edwin2008]

I found a RS232 connection via BT. In that case you could adress a dmx box via RS232 and the fysical cable part is replaced by BT. Still no time to test it

[Mversluis]

Hi Jeroen ,

I know there are very cheap wireless dmx controllers on the market , i think it would be by The Willows.
Check for you and come back with a answer

Gr Marco


This would be the link http://www.thewillows.nl/web2shop/?page ... relessdmx&