Welcome to this video covering the ENTTEC DMX USB Pro. Firstly we're going to have
a look at the hardware and then we're going to move on to configuration using ENTTEC's
Pro Manager software on a Windows PC. So, the DMX USB Pro is a one universe DMX USB device,
it's bi-directional and compatible with RDM (Remote Device Management) and standard DMX-512
1990, it also features inbuilt optical isolation, allowing stray voltages or
phantom power to be plugged into the DMX cable and not travel up the USB and fry your computer.
So let's look at the hardware in more detail.
At one end you can see we've got a USB 2.0 Type-B and we've also got an LED indicator.
On the other end we've got two DMX connectors.
We've got the five pin female for DMX output and a five pin male for DMX input.
So as I said before, this is a one universe widget meaning that you can't do input
and output at the same time. If you did want to do that, feel free to check out our USB Pro Mk2.
What is useful when you're doing DMX input, is the ability to chain through using the other
port as they are joined. This is useful for media server type applications. For example you might
want to go in on the male port, out on the female port and then to the next fixtures in the line.
Make sure when using the Pro as an input and linking to other fixtures that you terminate
the chain; as it's got pass through it doesn't have inbuilt termination.
Now let's plug it in. As you can see when first plugged in there's a single flash
on the LED indicator to show it's got power. It'll now sit in this state until it receives DMX
or is being given DMX to send out of its ports so let's head over to the Pro Manager software.
For the DMX USB Pro to be discovered on your computer it needs to have the
relevant drivers installed. When you download and install pro manager from the ENTTEC website,
There's the option to install FTDI D2XX drivers.
After you've done this discovery of the DMX USB Pro should be simple.
If you're a Mac OS user this is native to the operating system as of Mac OS release 10.2.
So as I said before I'm using Windows. Open up the start menu now it's going to
fire an internal window, before loading up Pro Manager within your web browser.
The first thing we're going to do is 'Press Find' devices to make sure everything's been discovered.
We're going to navigate to the drop-down and select our DMX USB Pro.
We can see the serial number, the firmware on the device,
an image of it, along with its capabilities.
So right now we've got firmware version 2.4 which enables DMX and RDM.
For this example we're not going to be using RDM. I'm going to select firmware version 1.44.
After pressing update firmware it's going to push the configuration to the device,
and now it's going to restart. Re-discovery will happen automatically and as we can see here, DMX
is now enabled and no RDM. The frame rate of the DMX USB Pro can be set by navigating to settings.
We can set the refresh rate the, Mark After Break (MAB) time and the Break time.
Once we're happy with this configuration,
we can save the DMX parameters. Here I'm going to increase it, to 40.
The DMX USB Pro also comes with some really useful test modes.
So if we navigate to 'DMX Send', we can select a Source > Test Patterns, We can connect live from
Art-Net coming from this PC, or the network almost like an Art-Net Node if you will.
Or we can select directly from faders. To make sure the output is enabled and
you can start dragging these individual faders to test any fixtures you might
have on site. Personally I'm a big fan of this, the USB Pro is always in my toolbox.
Okay, so once we're happy with this, as we can see when sending is happening on the hardware itself,
we get to flash on the indicator LED.
The next mode we have on the DMX USB Pro is DMX receive. So, I'm going to connect a DMX
source to it here, as you can see on the interface we're getting a live update every second or so,
just to show what channels are active. This is really useful when troubleshooting a larger system
as the DMX USB Pro doesn't have standalone or MIDI functionality,
we're not going to look at those today.
I hope this has been a useful introduction to the DMX USB Pro.
If you do have any questions, definitely put them in the comments below,
or get in touch with the support team.
Thanks for watching this video, see you again in the next one.