OLA and sACN: guidance needed

[Gonçalo Leal]

Hello everyone,

This is my first interaction here, so if you need more detailed information please let me know.

My name is Gonçalo Leal, I am in the final year of my master's degree in Computer Engineering and Telematics in Aveiro University, and I am currently working on my thesis. The goal of my thesis is to develop a solution (i.e. set of software tools and infrastructure) to facilitate the creation of more immersive experiences for tourism. 

Concretely, I want to synchronize lights, sound and AR animations. I thought about using sACN to control both lights and AR animations, however, to develop AR software I am using unity and C#. Can you give me some guidelines on how to create a C# client for OLA? I would mostly work on receiving sACN data, looking to the AR goggles as a normal lighting fixture and then using a dictionary to map the values received in each channel to a specific action in the AR simulation. 

Also, do you have any working example of C++ code capable of discovering fixtures using sACN's discovery functionality, and then sending DMX frames to the new device? You have some examples in your website, but they are not sACN specific. I would like to contribute to the project by developing a Golang client, can you give me some guidance on this?

To sum up, I need help with:

• C# OLA client (windows device)
• C++ sACN with OLA example
• GO OLA client

Keep up with the good work,

Gonçalo Leal

[Peter Newman]

Sorry for the slow reply Gonçalo.

I'm no expert on the C# side, I don't believe anything has been implemented already but it seems you should be able to use our C++ code from C#, or you could obviously create a fresh C# client.

In terms of Go, some work had been done by a few people, there's an issue to track it:
https://github.com/OpenLightingProject/ola/issues/728

And a more general tracker of other clients:
https://github.com/OpenLightingProject/ola/issues/1007

The rest of our https://www.openlighting.org/ola/apis/ are here if you need any more inspiration, plus a great guide Simon wrote on how the RPC stuff works https://docs.openlighting.org/ola/doc/latest/rpc_system.html .

Are you referring to the sACN Universe Discovery features, those are about transmitters which are sending sACN universes, rather than fixtures/receivers?

We've a few protocol specific bits (some examples in https://docs.openlighting.org/ola/man/ ), which would be exposed via the API, but generally OLA doesn't care what protocol you are using, it's all just DMX data, it's just down to what is patched to the OLA universe you are interacting with.