I don’t know if it will get you money for nothing or chicks for free, but I want my ACN, and so should you. ACN is the latest control protocol developed by the ESTA Control Protocols Working Group and was published late last year. It stands for… never mind what it stands for. It could stand for Another Cool Name or Artificial Canadian Nickels — it doesn’t matter. What does matter is what it will do and where it will eventually take this industry.
John Huntington recently wrote an article about the possibilities and potential of ACN. It is very insightful, but I believe that we have little idea of the real possibilities it presents. When the Internet became widespread in the 1980s, we knew that it was a powerful tool and that it might be a great way to disseminate information. But we had absolutely no idea that it could be used to sell all your used stuff (eBay), share your photos (Flicker), book travel (Priceline), view satellite images from all over the world (MapQuest) and buy Viagra (so I’m told).When you look down ACN Avenue, you can see some really great scenery. Remote fixture addressing, unlimited channel count and plug-and-play functionality are but a few of the landmarks. But it’s much more challenging — and maybe impossible — to see around the next corner or over the top of the hill.
But we have to get to the top of the hill before we can see over it. Was it just me, or did anyone else notice almost a complete lack of ACN implementation at LDI? If it weren’t for ETC, ACN might be MIA. ETC’s Eos console seems to be the only traffic cruising down the lonely highway of ACN.
The same goes for RDM. If not for PR Lighting and Robe, RDM might be too remote for any device to manage. PR Lighting and Robe both demonstrated their RDM capabilities at the Control Protocols Interoperability Booth at LDI. Where were the other automated lighting manufacturers?
Maybe the roadmap to ACN with all its three-letter acronyms is just too confusing. How many of us really know our PDUs from our UDPs? But as end-users, we shouldn’t have to. We should be able to take advantage of the protocol without having to understand how it works. It’s the job of the manufacturers to figure out how to do it.
ACN has the ability to provide all the information about a device to any ACN-enabled console. Every automated lighting fixture should, at the very minimum, be able to send a complete fixture profile of itself to any device that asks for it via ACN. If you connect an automated luminaire to an ACN-enabled console, you shouldn’t have to build a fixture profile for it or ask the console manufacturer to do so. If you then connect that console to a computer running a lighting CAD program, you shouldn’t have to go hunting for a symbol for it in the library — it should come from the fixture itself. It should be incumbent on the manufacturer who developed and built the luminaire to provide all the information, data, menuing and symbols for its own fixtures. Once we clear that hurdle, not only will it save time and aggravation for the designers and programmers, it will also help us to round the corner so we can see the next signpost.
Ask your favorite manufacturers to start encoding their fixtures with the information that you need for your projects and use ACN to send it to the console or computer. Support the first ones who do by specifying their fixtures on your jobs and buying their gear for your rental stock. Vote for ACN with your purchasing power, and it’s a guaranty that we will all be the winners.
For years now, Robe has put an 8P8C connector, better known as an RJ-45, on its automated lights and put “ready for ACN” in its literature. Now we’re all ready for ACN. Are the manufacturers ready to deliver it?
