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?

DMX512

DMX512 is a serial protocol used to control lighting equipment like dimmers. It was developed in 1986 by the USITT and updated in 1990. Detailed information on the standard can be found on the USITT pages. The protocol is very straightforward; basically, it does nothing more than repeatedly sending a block of 512 bytes over a serial RS485 line.

Wireshark

What is Wireshark? To answer this it is best to quote the description from the Wireshark website:

Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet. Wireshark has several powerful features, including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the reconstructed stream of a TCP session.

Wireshark supports an enormous amount of protocols, but there are still a number of obscure protocols that aren't used that often. But the users of those protocols would still be helped a lot if Wireshark supports those protocols, and so we started writing several Wireshark plugins.