Animated Lighting 16 channel controller

[Clovis84]

Would like to use my old AC 16 Chan controllers from Animated Lighting while using a PI controller for the RGB lights. Can anybody see a path for this dream? Animated Lighting hardware seems very old school but is still a solid platform - hate to see 128 channels not used anymore

[Gilrock]

Well if you want help you need to tell us more about what interfaces your controller has. 

[lightshowlane]

Not sure if this helps or not but Animated Lighting LC16 controllers communicated using RS485.  It would be great if xLight could control these legacy controllers because the software (animation director) is no longer updated or supported. 

One other option is to update the controller firmware so that they talk DMX (I have heard that this is possible).  I am investigation this now.  I am not sure how to get this firmware though.  Only issue with updating to DMX though would be that the show files would all be trash :-( (I could live with that) :-)

[CaptainMurdoch]

Since you said Pi, I assume you are talking about FPP.  If this is true and you can find any info about the protocol these controllers use, then I would take a look at it to see if we could possibly support the controllers in FPP.

[Gilrock]

RS485 is an electrical wiring standard not a protocol standard so about all we know from this is that its serial data.