DMX Interface No Longer Recognized by Xlights

[skyline513]

Hi everyone,

A bit new around here, I've been messing around with xlights for a few months now in preparation for Halloween.  At a very high level I'm using an Arduino Nano 33 IOT to receive DMX information from Xlights (using the DMXUSB library which emulates an ENTTEC USB DMX device), then selectively distribute lighting requests from that arduino using UDP over Wifi to other Nano 33 IOTs to drive WS2811 LED strips locally.


A few months ago when I first downloaded Xlights (Version 2020.22 running on Mac OSX 10.15.6) I was able to get the USB/DMX interface working reliably using the following settings in the controller configuration:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/9oxDL5pvvHLpNgzd6

Everything worked exactly as expected.  Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I decided I should update to the newest version of Xlights which was 2020.29 at the time.  Using the exact same controller settings, I could no longer get Xlights to recognize the arduino.  The "status indicator" remained red at the bottom of the window, and I was not able to Output to Lights without receiving the "Error:  Failed to connect to DMX network..".  Com port was the same, no updates were made to the arduino or the libraries.

Fast forward to a few days ago I upgraded again to 2020.37 and still could not get Xlights to recognize the arduino using the same settings.

Luckily I hadn't uninstalled 2020.22 yet, so I opened that back up and was able to connect to the DMX interface again!  I looked through the release notes for each version after 2020.22 to see if there was an obvious change that might result in the interface no longer working but nothing immediately jumped out.

Does anyone have any information or tips that might help?  The DMXUSB library is so slick and easy to use, I'd really like to not have to write a generic serial interface (or something else) if possible.

[skyline513]

Just created a quick and dirty generic serial interface for testing on the arduino, and Xlights 2020.37 doesn't appear to not be recognizing that either.

Although "generic serial" isn't a protocol type in 2020.22, it is still recognizing the arduino as an interface and allows me to enable the Output to Lights

[keithsw1111]

Is the protocol change intentional. One shows dmx the other generic serial.

[skyline513]

Hi keithsw1111, thank you for the reply

Yes it was intentional, I should've provided more clarification. 
I initially got the interface working using the DMX protocol selection on 2020.22.  Using the same controller settings including selecting DMX for the protocol I tried to get the interface to work using both 2020.29 and 2020.37 which did not work.

I next created a quick generic serial interface on the arduino to see if I could get Xlights 2020.37 to recognize it, which so far I haven't had any luck with. 

I was curious if 2020.22 would recognize the arduino running the serial interface with the controller settings set to DMX for the protocol (as 2020.22 doesn't support generic serial) but it recognized the interface and even allowed me to enable the Output to Lights.  This test is obviously not incredibly helpful but I was just trying to troubleshoot where I could with what I had to see if I could uncover something

Hopefully that helps?

[Gilrock]

That generic serial output option was just added 25 days ago.  I looked and it appears to just send out the raw channel values which I don't believe is the protocol the arduino would be expecting.

[skyline513]

Oh interesting, okay thank you for the info.

I don't know what exactly is happening on the Xlights side of things, but I would think that Xlights would still allow the data to be output even if the arduino didn't know what to do with it.  It appears that Xlights isn't wanting to even start a serial connection with the arduino

[keithsw1111]

Most likely reason opening the com port is failing is because something already has it open. Maybe you should close any other software that may be holding it open.

[skyline513]

That was my suspicion as well, but with absolutely nothing else open I still couldn't connect.   But as soon as I closed 2020.37 and opened 2020.22 I could connect using that version.

I've also been able to confirm this by closing Xlights (or even leaving it open), opening the arduino IDE and being able to open a serial monitor without issue.

[keithsw1111]

Maybe try changing port and back again. If it was impacting everyone someone would have said something and I don?t have OS X to test it on.

[skyline513]

I've tried that before as well, no luck unfortunately.

Not sure why I haven't tried this previously, but I downloaded Xlights 2020.37 on my windows machine to test the interface and it works using the same settings that I've been using on my mac.

I guess that means that either my mac is preventing the com port from opening using Xlights for whatever reason or there's a difference in operation from the windows to the OSX version of the software?

The "easy" solution would be to switch over to using my windows computer for Xlights, but I unfortunately can't do that due to developing this interface for friends of mine who only have apple computers

[dkulp]

This should be fixed in .38.    The App sandbox is blocking access to serial ports so I had to add an entitlement to let the sandbox know we'll need it.

[skyline513]

Huh, interesting find!  Glad to hear that this is going to be fixed! Thank you dkulp!

And thank you keithsw1111 and Gilrock for the suggestions as well!