RDM discover driving against dmx input (wrong cabling)

[sblair]

Michael,

This is the first time I've ever heard of this issue being raised. There's not a lot that can be done if two controllers are both driving the line at the same time. RDM runs on top of DMX so if DMX isn't even in a functional state then there isn't a huge amount that can be done.

If both consoles involved are your own, then you might investigate doing some intelligent monitoring of the line even during normal DMX transmission. If you read back your own data on the line as you are transmitting DMX and you see it getting corrupted then it is easy to determine that there is another controller driving the line as well and you can back off or alert the user in some intelligent way.

The controller doing RDM Discovery can also determine that something is horribly wrong too, when it gets to the bottom of the branch and finds it can't mute anything then it can abort discovery and give the user an appropriate error. Presumably if you have another controller driving the line then you are going to directly to the bottom of the very first branch and then stay there and nothing will be mutable so that would probably be a pretty easy scenario to detect.

Hope this helps.

Scott