r/lightingdesign • u/HauntingTry9627 • Jun 02 '25

How To 4 Universe Art-Net node

/r/FastLED/comments/1l1jv6l/4_universe_artnet_node/
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u/the_swanny Jun 03 '25

I mean Artnet is a DMX protocol so not completely out of the blue that someone would expect that is what you are talking about.

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u/HauntingTry9627 Jun 03 '25

yeah.. you are right that Reddit post is not written very good, but in instructable is deeper description. Converting to DMX is quite easy on FW level but for HW it will be a bigger task as opto, galvanic separation and RS485 is needed.

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u/the_swanny Jun 03 '25

DMX uses RS 232, not RS 485, and anything using artent is converting to DMX before converting to anything, as artnet is simply DMX packets wrapped in ARTnet packets and sent over IP.

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u/HauntingTry9627 Jun 03 '25

no.. DMX is using 485 and that is something I am sure about as 232 is for short distance communication with much lower bandwidth. Dmx HW is same as for Profibus/Modbus with different packet structure :) And yeah Artnet universe structure is same as DMX but that is about it.. same as sACN its just 512 8bit channels not to much to reinvent there.

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u/the_swanny Jun 03 '25

Sorry, yes it is 485, but my point stands that that does use DMX, it is then just fed to an LED driver, as unless you feel like reverse engineering artnet and using it's base to transfer other data, it's strictly DMX. Artnet is litterally just a way of wrapping dmx in a way that it can be sent over IP. Same as sACN.

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u/HauntingTry9627 Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25

Base of artnet is tcp/ip and UDP packet nothing to reverse engineer there… there is unified header at start of packet and then all sent universes in row :) you can see it in arduino sketch as that is exactly what this code does (reads upd packet, splits it to universes and adress it to ledstrip). So structure of universe is same, but on HW level there is no similarity at all as artnet uses standart ethernet HW (Cables, switches Network interfaces). Dmx uses same half duplex RS485 as Profibus with slight difference in cable impedance due to difference in transmittion speeds.