I was wondering if anyone knows anything about
Leviton's Colornet
Protocol? My school has a
Leviton Inovator, and I was looking into hooking it up through the school's computer
network. Does anyone have any tips? I can't find much information about it, including how to set it up, especially downloading the Colornet
Protocol. Or is is plug-and-play using remote access through the
network?
It is never a good idea to run any show critical equipment on a communal
network. Even on a closed
network it is not always good practice to run show critical gear on a
network that is connected to the internet.
Just as an example, we have our sound computer on a closed
network with a WAN so that the sound designer can sit in the
house during tech and use VNC to make changes while the sound op sits in the booth. The WAN connection allows the SD to also access the studio computer, which is on a different
network to pul files over if needed. During the tech for our
current show the sound computer was hacked, and we had to reformat and reinstall everything. You definitely don't want people to hack your lighting
console.
If you want to set up a
network so that you can log in to your
console using a computer, you should set up an entirely separate
network from the school's. Most of the lighting consoles may speak their own language (
ETCNet,
Strand ShowNet, ColorNet,
etc) but they are generally all TCP/IP based protocols, so you can use standard
network gear. You may have to set up correct IP addresses and subnets, but you should be able to hook everything up and if you have the appropriate software and/or hardware it should work.