ETCLink

Brontz

New Member
I am a new supervisor at this venue that has an ETCLink. I have never used this before and the information I've found online has been sparse to say the least. Anyone have a resource they could recommend?
 
ETC is a good place to start.

You may also want to search for articles about ETCNet1 and ETCNet2, depending on the vintage of the system.
 
I am a new supervisor at this venue that has an ETCLink. I have never used this before and the information I've found online has been sparse to say the least. Anyone have a resource they could recommend?

It was a dedicated feedback from the dimmer racks to a console. Used a propriatary signal on a cable with a 6 pin XLR connector at the console, which for the era in which it was installed, would have been the Express/Insight/Expression (maybe Obsession as well) consoles. So not compatible with the current Eos/Ion series and only legacy Sensor racks.

Basically gave you feedback status of dimmers in the rack as well as rack particulars. Cannot recall details, I think once you had a system installed you could "snapshot" the dimmers and the system would know how much a load per dimmer, then if you lost a lamp, the system would see that and tell you on the console that a dimmer has a lost load, or some such.
 
Also required to fully enjoy/exploit ETCLink was dimmers/modules with "AF" suffix, i.e. D20AF instead of D20. Which of course cost more. A good idea and useful features, but users just did not take to it. The reluctance had to have been more than just running one extra cable, one would think.
 
Another useful feature of ETCLink was that it allowed racks to talk to each other before Ethernet came in. The CEM in each rack would hold the entire configuration for all racks in the system. To replace a CEM in any rack the configuration could be loaded in the new CEM across ETCLink from another rack. The behavior of the CEM would depend on the rack number set in it. This made for a fairly quick replacement.
 
Can you post a photo of what you're talking about? Everyone so far is describing a communication protocol used to talk between certain ETC consoles and dimmer racks (because that's what ETCLink really is: a protocol, not a device). The way you said, "an ETCLink" makes me think you have a specific device you're wondering about, and we could likely identify it and give more info on how to use it if we can get a look at it.
 
The way you said, "an ETCLink" makes me think you have a specific device you're wondering about,
Reminds me of the old anecdote...
During a load-in, a novice crew member goes to her boss and says, "What is a DMX and where do we have one?"
 

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