The lingua franca of theatrical lighting control is a physical-layer protocol designed for custom cabling called DMX. Light boards emit an array of 512 values in the range [0,255] and dimmers, or lighting instruments themselves, interpret these values as parameters like intensity. For various reasons it's useful to carry this signal over an IP network, and proprietary standards to do so have proliferated.
Light boards these days are just computers with some domain-specific IO. Tired of our ancient ETC Expression console, my colleagues and I wanted to start using ETC's new Nomad control software on our laptops. Our venue's dimmers only understood ETCNet2, while Nomad could only speak the newer ETCNet3 (and a few other open standards we couldn't use). Attempting a software upgrade on the dimmers themselves seemed incredibly risky. To bring Nomad's output to DMX would have required an additional $500 hardware purchase on top of the already-not-cheap software license.
On the message boards, I discovered a strange fact. The ETC-branded DMX<->Net2 interfaces we owned were actually white-label manufactured by a company called Pathport. Pathport boxes spoke a much wider array of protocols using the same hardware. These things handled firmware updates by flashing themselves with whatever was served to them over BOOTP. Pathport firmware images were free to download straight from the manufacturer.
Net3->Net2 was too much to ask for, but they could do ArtNet (an open standard) to DMX. Nomad could also emit ArtNet. So I flashed and configured one node to operate as ArtNet -> DMX, and plugged it into another node configured for DMX -> Net2.
So now, locked in a closet, there is a very strange loop of switch -> hacked ETC box -> normal ETC box -> switch which seems bizarrely redundant, but actually makes the world go 'round. And I could run lights and sound from any network drop in the building.
Wow, this brings back memories of running the theater in my school. Definitely a different situation, but I like to think we did a good job given what we had.
We didn't really have a budget, just some hand-me-down equipment that came from above sometimes. I and others on my team put together so many hacks to make things work. One memorable time, our light board had broken, but we still needed to run shows.
We didn't have enough time to wait for shipping on a real USB->DMX adapter, nor budget for a new board, so I created a hacked together DMX adapter with a serial to USB adapter and a NAND gate (I put schematics together here, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/magmastonealex/DMXAdapters).
It worked remarkably well for being a bit of a hack, but paired with software like QLC+, had more features than our old light board! It was still in use for controlling special effect lighting when I left, though thankfully not for main lighting and day-to-day use.
Light boards these days are just computers with some domain-specific IO. Tired of our ancient ETC Expression console, my colleagues and I wanted to start using ETC's new Nomad control software on our laptops. Our venue's dimmers only understood ETCNet2, while Nomad could only speak the newer ETCNet3 (and a few other open standards we couldn't use). Attempting a software upgrade on the dimmers themselves seemed incredibly risky. To bring Nomad's output to DMX would have required an additional $500 hardware purchase on top of the already-not-cheap software license.
On the message boards, I discovered a strange fact. The ETC-branded DMX<->Net2 interfaces we owned were actually white-label manufactured by a company called Pathport. Pathport boxes spoke a much wider array of protocols using the same hardware. These things handled firmware updates by flashing themselves with whatever was served to them over BOOTP. Pathport firmware images were free to download straight from the manufacturer.
Net3->Net2 was too much to ask for, but they could do ArtNet (an open standard) to DMX. Nomad could also emit ArtNet. So I flashed and configured one node to operate as ArtNet -> DMX, and plugged it into another node configured for DMX -> Net2.
So now, locked in a closet, there is a very strange loop of switch -> hacked ETC box -> normal ETC box -> switch which seems bizarrely redundant, but actually makes the world go 'round. And I could run lights and sound from any network drop in the building.