Ideal DMX Universes for my project

Hello. This is my first time working with DMX and although I have a basic surface level understanding I'm unsure what the ideal amount of universes is best for my project. There's a total of 8 4-port gateways. 4 of those gateways are going to be using all 4 port (I'll call these flood lights) and the remaining 4 will only use 1 port since those lights will be daisy chained since they will all be the same color (I'll call these necklace lights). I know I'm using sACN since between each gateway from the controller there is ethernet/fiber connections since they are all a fair distance away from each other.

I know I will be using at least 2 universes to separate the two types of lights but besides that are there ever any issues with 4 different controllers using the same universe so long as they are in the same network? The way I'm imagining is Universe 1 will host the flood lights using channels 1-64 for the 16 individual lights on 4 of the gateways and on the remaining 4 gateways those will be Universe 2 using channels 1-16 for the 4 daisy chain lights.

  • It's no problem for more than one device on a network to output the same logical sACN universe. This system could use universe 1 for everything if you wanted, it would work just the same. The only time you are required to use multiple universes is when you run out of available addresses, but like you mentioned you may want to split up your system between universes for organizational purposes.