Until the
power to the
fixture, or the
power supply fails, then nothing gets downstream, which is not currently a problem with daisy
DMX.
And I cannot imagine the
fixture manufacturers are going to want to
build in reliable switches to ea. and every
fixture.
Possibly installing a pass-thru that rely's on external
PoE would work. Or get some 3Com IntelliJacks in durable handy boxes on c-clamps, as
distro on the
truss/pipe. Probably cheaper as well and have other uses.
SB
The
PoE idea has it's own issues. To do it, you'd have to also have a
PoE source in every light to
power up the
PoE feed to the next device. It would be an extra expense and especially towards the lower end of the market that will be problematic in making sure all the manufacturers did it. I mean look at how many currently use 3 pin "
DMX" connectors...
The
ethernet idea also allows for really quick and easy isolation of rings via fibre... BUT one would need to go to fibre to be getting the same distances as you can currently get on an RS485 based
DMX line... This then brings certain other issues in field repairs, terminations and rugged connectors (very few of which are easily field terminable or repairable).
The 3com
unit referred to does not seem to inherently support QoS which might be alright for your lighting needs, but QoS is vital for audio or other such real time applications. A 100ms delay before a light changes is unlikely to be the end of the world, losing that much audio will be noticed...
Appropriately set up, sharing a LAN is possible. Possible and advisable are not the same thing. I know of some Cobranet installs that really did not appreciate sharing a LAN. We had some incidents, which I'm not sure we ever really found the cause of, where we were losing audio that was being distributed via
ethernet during the papal mass in Sydney last year.
I just don't really see lighting getting to the
point that high end audio has reached whereby you can run
ethernet into the amps. Amps tend to be congregated much more than lighting and so you can run a
switch in the rack without such a big deal.
Fortunately the IT boys have doen much of the hard work on
Ethernet for us. This like RSTP can be an easy way of adding redundancy to our systems. Economies of scale also factor...
There IS a reason why Lenovo chose to deploy a sum total of zero wireless networks for anything that mattered during the Beijing Olympics. The exceptions were things like common rooms or the like in the athletes village. Convenience played and it would not have been the end of the world if it went down... Relying on a wireless
network is not neccessarily a wise move...
Oops, looks like this has progressed from reply to dissertation...