Looking for advice on building a DAC box. I’m wondering what some of you are rocking especially 4+ fixture setups. I’m curious on expansion to Etherdream. Attached is a photo of my attempt. I just bought the 50m usb over cat 6 extender. This is intended to be left Upstage with shorter DB25 runs to my 3 fixtures. I run cat6 to from my PC at front of house. I’m wondering about the next 4 fixtures I bring into my setup,
gear requirements and casing.
Has anyone made a nice , compact, rugged, unique, cheap and effective show-ready travel case they’d be willing to show? I’ve mused several ideas, and using the dj road case with opening for cable is my economical and immediate solution.
Hi, I use the same USB range extender together with 2 Helios DAC.
Works great, but if the receiver on DAC side did not get any connection for a long time (computer powered off and receiver has power), the connection can not be established again. A reset is necessary by cutting power.
If you want to use more lasers, I recommend using Eatherdream or FB3/4 devices over network as USB is not the best choice for lot of lasers.
Hello,
I think the same thing. I want to take Ether dream but the price is high. Small question, are the lasers with fb3/fb4 card recognized by Liberation?
I built a few DAC stage boxes using 2U ABS cases with a custom front panel. Each has two Etherdreams, a PoE switch, some PoE to DC jack adapters and a relay board to drive E-stop. They have Ethercon jacks for network in/out and E-Stop in/out, DB25s for ILDA out and a key lockout. I think I posted photos somewhere on the forum.
With hindsight this was a mistake. Routing ILDA cables even 5 or 10m is a pain in the arse, especially when you’re balancing off a speaker stack to reach a front bar (I’d never do that obviously…). I plan to replace them all with small single channel boxes in a custom metal case that can be dual-locked to the projector or hung from a clamp. I’m in two minds about keeping the PoE - it’s super convenient but having an onboard PSU and a truecon might have reduced my troubleshooting.
Thats the inside of my Etherdream rack, essentially just a switch and a usb power distro. It’s now inside a 2U rack and i’m getting a panel made for the Ilda outputs. I’m going to implement the E-stop into the Ilda so there will be a relay system in between those ribbon cables and the output panel, but I haven’t got round to that quite yet.
So far I’ve never had any issues with the Etherdreams at all, they connect without fail and are as solid as a rock. I 3D printed the Etherdream cases with a design that was shared on this forum by Adam, and it makes them super easy to take a few out of the rack to lend to friends, and put back with no hasstle.
I don’t think there is neccessarily a “cheap” way of doing things in general. I guess the cheap way is using USB DAC’s, but they’re not going to be as reliable and scalable in the long run.
Etherdream is absolutely the way to go but if you need to use USB DACs for whatever reason and still want to connect to them over the network, the Digi USBAnywhere systems are excellent for this. Expensive too though so it’s not really any savings over etherdream.
The interlock system is my own design which was originally a separate box but I decided to combine it here.. based on relays.
The power supply for the DACs was originally a 5V (slim laptop style supply) but nowadays I use only USB C power supplies because they are easier to adjust according to the situation (I don’t always keep all 8 DACs on for nothing if I only need one, for example)
