ETC Nomad and ETC Element Networking

Hi everyone,

As part of the theatre at my college, the in-house tech has let me create a lighting network. At the moment, we mainly use oscRFR to do remote focussing and change cues/show directors lighting states which is done using an Android tablet which has been bought for this purpose - the tech was going to do it anyway but I just helped get it over the line as it were. 

I also purchased the student version of ETC Nomad to use in our studio space which doesn't really have a permanent desk - we have to take the Element out from the main theatre to use in the studio and back again. However, I do want to use Nomad in our main theatre so I can program with the director next to me (the joys of educational theatre) without having to shout through the walls of our booth but...

Our Element and my laptop don't want to work together either wired or wireless. My laptop is able to get an IP address from the console and I am able to ping the console from my laptop and my laptop from the console. I managed to do this by connecting a CAT 5 cable straight from the back of the console to the Ethernet port on my laptop. Is this recommended? From looking things up online a switch seems to be recommended but then our Element has two Ethernet ports so we use one for the router/wireless access point and the other for my laptop.

I did manage to get things to work briefly having run Nomad in mirror mode and the Element in primary but then after about 10 seconds, my laptop lost the master and has since refused to connect back to the console and the console has refused to connect to my laptop. In the network menu, I can see the console and the laptop but they each have a red line through them.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I'm a beginner when it comes to networking and I am sure that it's something obvious I've missed but I can't seem to find what I'm missing. I remember reading that connecting to mirror mode via Nomad is the only thing you can do with an Element but I don't know how true this is.

Both my laptop and the console are running the same version of Eos with the same build number and fixture library. 

Thanks for all your help. 

Parents Reply Children
  • In both the console and the laptop, the network cards go to 'sleep' quite quickly.  You end up restarting the console and laptop several times to try to get the timing just right so that they will see each other at the right time and connect and stay connected.  With a switch you don't have this problem, if the switch is on first, you can start the console any time and the laptop any time, their cards won't go to sleep so they will connect.  It is one less thing to go wrong when setting up the connection between the two.  The straight cable will work, I've done it, but you will have to fuss with it quite a bit to get the timing on restarting one and then the other just right.

  • Ohh okay, I didn't know that. I will give that a try and see if that helps. 

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