Sometimes, you solve a problem, only to find that you haven’t yet solved ALL the problems.  Welcome back to Networking Difficulties part three.  One of the behaviors that has been super interesting as we’ve gone through all the troubleshooting is the nodes would typically drop universes within three minutes.  This usually indicates either EEE or a multicasting problem, but it’s uncommonly fast.  I now know it could be incompatible Per Address Priority.

If you’re not already aware, Per Address Priority is baked into sACN and it allows multiple controllers to talk to the same lights, but with per address priority.  You could say the Paradigm system has a higher priority for the addresses that control the house light dimmers for example, but the console has higher priority of the addresses for the front lights.  I’ve honestly never needed it on set, but it’s on in Eos by default under Patch>Protocols>sACN. 

Recently, Netron rolled out support for Per Address Priority.  But it is NOT playing well with Eos right now (current firmware 3.0.1).  On the list of bizarre behavior, check out this little video I took of the sACN view within Netron.

That’s the Netron shifting between the values of the correct universe (10) and the values of the incorrect universe (11).  This is happening across all universes.  The answer is to simply turn off Per Address Priority in Eos and this particular problem disappears instantly.  And with it goes a great deal of (but not all) of the dropping of universes.

Shoutout to Nick Saiki of Elation for suggesting it and to the whole team for working with me this week to identify what was going on in my system.  Here’s hoping for a nice boring week of simply doing my job instead of constantly running around finding unresolved issues.

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Mark LaPierre is a programmer in film, television and theater based out of Albuquerque.  He grew up in live entertainment and has been a designer/programmer for musicals, concert dance, live music, circus and corporate.  Mark is a proud member of IATSE Local 28 and 480, an ETC Eos trainer and an enthusiastic trainer of many other platforms and subjects.  He offers remote console coaching in 30 minute to 4 hour times as well as a full range of training in person.  If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.