Horizon Control Provides First Console to Transmit ACN

LDI - The Entertainment Technology Show - Orlando November 2003

For those who are a little geeky, this year's LDI was a watershed moment as far as controls go.  For years ESTA's Control Protocols Working Group, and more specifically, the ACN Task Group have been working on a replacement for DMX called Advanced Control Network.  ACN is a TCP based protocol that provides device discovery and real-time feedback and control for your entire entertainment technology rig. There has been lots and lots of talk and a number of documents, but not until this LDI has the public witnessed the dawn of a new era of control. ACN will become an ANSI standard and is currently in public review. It was successfully demonstrated at the ESTA Interconnectivity Pavilion at LDI and Horizon Control was there.

As well as producing a document to describe how to implement ACN, many sample files of code and routines were produced by the task group.  Horizon Control has participated in a somewhat auxiliary fashion for the past two years in anticipation that we would be one of the first to jump on board once things got nailed down a little further.  Participation from many of the industries manufacturers has been unprecedented.  The cooperation and good will between members of the task group has really been something special. In the days before the show, Alan Martello, Horizon Control's code architect joined other members of the task group to finalize the code and hunt down those last few bugs.

For this demonstration of open communication between manufactures, ETC provided a ACN compatible Sensor dimmer rack, Martin provided a Mac250 Krypton moving light, Pathway Connectivity had a Pathport which acted as an ACN/DMX/RDM gateway, Strand supplied at 300 Series console and Sand Network Systems produced multi-media based applications controlled by ACN. Horizon Control and Entertainment Technology donated a Marquee ILC which produced ACN for the other devices to listen to.

For the uninitiated, we were doing no more than running a chase on our console to control some lights, but for those that took the time to delve deeper, they found out that ACN is something special. This demonstration is only the beginning, and only the future will tell how us and other manufactures take advantage of this new 'pipe'.