ACN
ACN, or Multipurpose Network Control Protocol Suite - its official name -
is a protocol suite that is designed to control lighting and other theater equipment
over a network, such as Ethernet, for example. Of course there are already
several network technologies with these capabilities, including
DMX, MIDI or
Art-Net. So
why choose ACN over the others?
ACN ensures that devices made by manufacturer A can talk to
devices made by manufacturer B. With the current rise of Ethernet-based
protocols this is badly needed, or the theater industry could find
itself in the same situation as it was in the pre-DMX era. The use of
a standard protocol is advantageous to both users and developers. For the
users it means fewer different protocols to deal with, better
compatibility between products, and, in the end, cheaper products. For
developers it means they can concentrate on making their product instead of
designing protocols; just as now no one would write their own Operating
System or TCP/IP stack.
News
Wireshark
ACN can, and most likely will be, run over TCP/IP based networks. On those
networks good old DMX testers and the like are useless. What is needed is a
network analyzer like Wireshark. To analyze ACN with Wireshark, I wrote a
plugin that will display ACN-PDU's in great detail, which will make debugging
ACN problems almost as easy as debugging a DMX problem. For more information
on Wireshark see my
Wireshark page.
libacn
libacn will be an Open Source implementation of the ACN protocol suite. It is
currently in development, also as a way to verify the ACN specification. Keep an
eye on these pages for the development of libacn.
Downloads
References
ESTA website :
http://www.esta.org
ESTA ACN webpage :
http://www.esta.org/tsp/working_groups/cp.html
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