DMX512

DMX512, is a digital communication standard, which is widely used in stage lighting and entertainment lighting solutions.  The use of DMX512 protocol is to control the dimming level of each of the LEDs up to 512 channels.

Different control interfaces are used for providing control information to the LED fixtures. Some of these are Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI), PowerLine Communication (PLC), Digital MultipleX (DMX512) and Wireless protocols. DALI is the popular in the building lighting applications whereas DMX512 is popular in the entertainment industry most commonly stage lighting.

DMX512 describes the digital data transmission between controllers and lighting equipment and other accessories. It is a serial, digital, packet-based protocol with a transmission speed of 250 Kbps. It deploys a multi-drop bus topology called 'daisy-chain' where the slaves are connected one after another to the DMX512 host. Each host can connect to a maximum of 512 slaves on one bus with slot addresses starting from 1 and ending at 512.

DMX512 connection point has five assigned end-points: data 1-, data1+, data2-, data2+ and a common reference. data2- and data2+ are used for creating the daisy-chain network, they carry the same signals of the first differential line (data1- and data1+).