xLights 2024 on macOS 12/13/14 and LOR Pixie 16

[bngoofy]

Hey All

I'm testing my first Mega Tree and seam to be having some issues.

Tree is 44 Ports with 100 Node Per String (Mattos Evo Pixels) (300 Channels Per String) and a 3 String 270 Node 5 Point Star. using ports 45 - 47

I have 3 LOR Pixie 16 and set up a controller on a clean instance of xLights. Using LOR USB-RS485-HS and direct ethernet cable to Pixie 16. The other two units are daisy chained via ethernet cables. The Pixies are set to LOR Unit IDs 11, 21, 31 and Controller ID (Universe) is 1.

The controller set up is LOR/LOR Optimized with three devices each with 300 Channels. They map correctly to the tree model but in Visualizer they show the error, "ERR: Pixel port 17 is not valid on this controller. Valid ports 1-16"

When I use the LOR Hardware utility to test, all seams well and communication is working as expected.

When I test within xLights I get the ports 1 - 16 but 17 - 47 are stating, "ERR: Pixel port 17 is not valid on this controller. Valid ports 1-16" in the Visualizer.

What did I do wrong? Any help would be appreciated. I have attached some screen shots.

Thanks

 

[MikeKrebs]

xLights probably needs an update on its USB/Pixie 16 controller definition.

Not a LOR or xLights guru but just playing with a USB LOR Pixie16 in Windows xLight (2024.08), it is very flaky with its allowed and not allowed. Lots of change something, save, click on something else, reload the controller and new options show up. Click on those, save, rinse repeat and yet even when I eventually got 3 controllers on the USB defined, I never got more than 16 ports defined in the visualizer.

 

[bngoofy]

Thanks for testing. I also got the same result. Hoping there is a fix or that I missed something that someone may see

 

[dkulp]

Personally, I'd strongly recommend selling the Pixies on eBay and getting a real e1.31 controller. The Pixies will not work perfectly with xLights/FPP. They may work "well enough" for some cases, but there will always be additional limits.

Second: I wouldn't spend much time getting it working in xLights on macOS. Since you won't be running your show that way, concentrate on getting it working from FPP. The visualizer is likely not going to work well or at all.

Again, I strongly recommend replacing the Pixies with a real controller.

 

[Croydon Lights]

Could it be because you have set it up to one controller and this controller only has 16 ports
If you set it up to indiv start channels instead so as to cover all three controllers

 

[Gilrock]

I wrote all the code to run the Pixies and there was only 16 ports at the time. The LOR Enhanced protocol is proprietary so I had to use packet sniffing to reverse engineer it the best I could. The protocol is not very efficient unless you are pumping a lot of the same color to the pixels. I thought they upgraded the Pixies to use E1.31 now so can anyone verify that? That would be the way to go otherwise a Pixie using the LOR protocol is not going to be able to run at full capacity in xLights and I question how well it could perform even using LOR software if you ran something with a ton of color like a Butterfly effect on all the channels. If someone wants an upgrade to that Pixie driver I'll probably need to provide my PayPal address...lol.