“True revolutionaries are guided by feelings of love.” — Che Guevara
If everything goes according to plan, the revolution will start at 9 a.m. tomorrow. The plan is for you to realize that you want Remote Device Management (RDM).
American National Standard E1.20-2006: Entertainment Technology — RDM — Remote Device Management Over DMX512 Networks, better known as RDM, has been approved for almost three years but you would hardly know it by working in the field. There might be more Elvis sightings around here than there are working RDM devices in the field. It’s not that there are no RDM devices on the market; there are. But there are precious few consoles that can take advantage of them.
Lots of Fixtures, Few Consoles
Some of the automated lighting manufacturers and manufacturers of networking devices who are cranking out RDM products include Martin, High End Systems, Robe and PR Lighting. Goddard Design Company, Doug Fleenor Design, Enttec, Pathway Connectivity, LSC, Artistic Licence and Wybron all offer RDM splitters or hubs. But I can count on one hand…no, make that one finger, the number of manufacturers who I know make consoles with RDM capabilities — Compulite. When I have asked manufacturers about their plans to update their software to include RDM I always seem to get the same answer — there’s no demand for it.
There have been a number of champions of the protocol, including the volunteers who spent hours and hours in ESTA Technical Standards Committee meetings hammering it out. Wybron has been a devotee since the early days, giving out their code and Watchdog chips for free and offering help with the deployment and implementation in other manufacturer’s products. And now that the protocol is published, Wybron, Martin Professional and Enttec have formed an organization called Institute for Feedback Excellence (IFE) with the aim of putting various RDM devices together. They are offering a service to test the compatibility between manufacturers and their products with regards to RDM.
RDM is a protocol that uses DMX512-A to send and receive messages between a controller and an RDM-enabled device like a lighting instrument, a fog machine, dimmer, or whatever Doug Fleenor decides needs to be remotely controlled — last year it was a glockenspiel. The protocol allows you to “discover” RDM devices on the network, configure them from the console and monitor them remotely. The ANSI standard spells out how it is supposed to work. What could possibly go wrong?
Keny Whitright, the president of Wybron, found out what could go wrong.
Last year, when he was working the PLASA trade show, he took the opportunity to test the RDM capabilities of Wybron’s Infogate with those of another manufacturer. What he found was that one man’s RDM is another man’s, er, something other than RDM. The gear they tested worked in some fashion but not completely as expected. He got with Nic Moreau and Peter Willis of Enttec and together they devised a list of procedures to test the RDM interoperability of competing manufacturer’s products. Somewhere along the way they enlisted Martin Professional and started the IFE.
Verifying and Evaluating
The idea behind the IFE is to “verify and evaluate” whether an RDM-capable product meets the RDM spec. Ultimately the goal is to find out if it is compatible with other products and whether or not it is really “interoperable.” Any manufacturer who ponies up $250 will get a Final Test Report telling them what worked and what didn’t work along with recommendations for improving the RDM functions of the product.
The test covers the hardware for responders and the software for both responders and controllers. More specifically, it tests the discovery, remote configuration, reporting and monitoring and compatibility with the Wybron Infogate controller.
And therein lies the rub. Some people in the industry are critical of the IFE’s inclusion of this test for compatibility of proprietary products. In addition, since they are using their own products to test for compliance, in essence, they are using them as the “gold standard.” If these products have any RDM issues themselves, then the testing may not bear accurate results.
A Mobile Lab
Whitright commented about the IFE: “It makes sense to test against Infogate because it’s the only RDM controller out there, in addition to Enttec’s controller, which is also used in the IFE tests. And we completely understand the need to protect proprietary information, so that’s why the IFE has a mobile lab that can be shipped to a manufacturer’s headquarters. They can conduct the tests themselves, following the step-by-step directions in the test procedure document.”
Whitright and the others involved in IFE started the organization because ESTA, the standards making organization, declined to take on the task of testing manufacturer’s compliance with the standard. After all, it takes precious resources — time and money — that are already stretched as it is. To burden the program with a venture that falls outside of the scope of the organization simply made little sense. The standards that ESTA creates are guidelines for the industry and compliance is the “sole and exclusive responsibility of the manufacturer,” according to verbiage that appears in every standard they produce. It also says that ESTA and ANSI “do not approve, inspect, or certify any installations, procedures, equipment or materials for compliance with codes, recommended practices or standards.”
So the IFE was born out of a desire to promote the standard and its interoperability among manufacturers. To get more information about IFE, visit www.fbexcellence.org.
Better still, there’s an upcoming opportunity for any manufacturer to test their RDM-capable products with several other manufacturers free of charge. The second ESTA Plugfest will take place in Dallas during the July ESTA meetings. The first one was last January and several manufacturers, including Doug Fleenor Designs, Goddard Designs, Enttec and Howard Eaton, spent a couple of days shooting code between their wares looking for compatibility issues. As a result, several issues were resolved and some of the people involved said that they accomplished more in a weekend at Plugfest than they had in several weeks working on their own.
If the second session is anything like the first then it will be an excellent opportunity to test your gear with a wide variety of products in various configurations. Any issues that are discovered can instantly be sorted out with the debugger, and the code can be changed, compiled and tested again. In addition, you gain the benefit live interaction with experienced people in the room, many of whom helped write the standard and know the ins and outs of the protocol. As one person put it, for the price of a weekend in Dallas you can “stand on the shoulders of giants” and take advantage of the vast knowledge and experience of the other people in the room.
And that leads me back to the revolution. Imagine a world where control is centralized at the controller and not necessarily distributed among the many devices in a lighting rig. Imagine pressing a sequence of buttons on a console and getting back a list of each device on the network along with a complete description of what it is and what it does. Think of how it will feel to be able to configure every device from the FOH, including the DMX512 starting address, the mode, the personality and more. The technology is there. All that’s missing is a revolution. And the revolution starts at 9 a.m. the day after you imagine RDM in its full implementation.
