For at least eight days out of the year, ESTA holds to of its four annual meetings in Dallas, and when it does, much of the future of entertainment production is forged. The meeting in January was no exception…When I got there, I found Bob Goddard, Doug Fleenor, Milton Davis, Scott Blair, Peter Willis and a few others…Willis demonstrated the discovery process of RDM, where the controller polls the network by broadcasting to all the connected devices a command asking them to respond if they are RDM-enabled. (Through a process of identification and isolation, the discovery process can pinpoint any one of 281,474,976,710,656 possible User IDs as the source of a problem.) …Milton and Doug, meanwhile, were trying to figure out why a fixture was not behaving correctly. Milton had discovered that the power supply was passing along the RDM data to the fixture instead of filtering it out as it was supposed to. The problem was easily identified, thanks to their efforts. This is why the digital jam session — better known as the RDM Plugfest — exists: to iron out the wrinkles in this emerging technology.
—Richard Cadena, from “Focus on Fundamentals,” PLSN, Feb. 2009
