ACNACN, 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. WiresharkACN 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.DownloadsReferencesESTA website : http://www.esta.orgESTA ACN webpage : http://www.esta.org/tsp/working_groups/cp.html |
