My company purchased a MaestroDMX which was advertised as an “intelligent” DMX lighting controller. I thought this was the smartest path given that I was challenged in a short time window to set up a light show. The device worked ok to get started and certainly helped me learn DMX. Once I understood the basic concept of DMX it was easy considering I had once studied computer memory address mapping. But the MaestroDMX was not what I thought it was.
The MaestroDMX operated the lights and did some of what I thought it would do, but it wasn’t what I thought it was and it definitely wasn’t driving the lights by Ai with any type of intelligence that I could observe. Their site refers to it as an “intelligent” light controller and their Kickstarter campaign listed it as an Ai controller.
The unit is actually running on a NanoPi computer which costs about $50 and I felt it did very little to help run my lights. It did what I considered an “ok” job but when I made what I expected to be big changes they were subtle and just did not seem to react like I expected. After using the device several times I decided to challenge myself to see if I can build something better. And in my humble opinion, I have built something far superior.