RDM with OLA

RDM devices can be configured through the web interface (only partially complete) or from the command line. Even if you don't have any RDM devices you can still experiment with RDM because the Dummy Plugin creates a fake RDM device.

Device Discovery

The ola_rdm_discovery tool displays the UIDs found for each universe.

$ ola_rdm_discover  -u 1
414c:010014b3

Passing the -f options will force the discovery algorithm to be run for the particular universe. This won't produce any output unless and error occurs.

$ ola_rdm_discover  -u 1 -f

Device Configuration

The ola_rdm_get and ola_rdm_get commands allow attributes of the devices to be controlled. The first thing to do is to view a list of all known attributes:

$ ola_rdm_get  --list_pids
boot_software_version_id
boot_software_version_label
capture_preset
clear_status_id
comms_status
default_slot_value
device_hours
device_info
...

To fetch the value of a PID from a device use:

$ ola_rdm_get  --universe 1 --uid 414c:010014b3 device_info

Changing the value works in a similar way:

$ ola_rdm_set  --universe 1 --uid 414c:010014b3 comms_status  # clear the communication counters

The full list of options can be found by running with --help:

  -d, --sub_device <device> target a particular sub device (default is 0)
  -h, --help                               display this help message and exit.
  -l, --list_pids                         display a list of pids
  -u, --universe <universe>  universe number.
  --uid <uid>                            the UID of the device to control.

Useful Tricks

If you're using bash, it's worthwhile to set up tab completion of PIDs:

$ complete -W "$(ola_rdm_get -l | xargs)" ola_rdm_get
$ complete -W "$(ola_rdm_get -l | xargs)" ola_rdm_set