AVB and ACN

Not getting any feedback here, but I have been continuing to research AVB.  This is what I think.

AVB is a good idea and ETC and pretty much any manufacturer that wants to be engaged in network communication into the future should design it into their control surfaces, endpoint devices and everything in-between.  The clear advantage is that network communication for any device that is AVnu compliant is able to reliably operate on a local area network without risk of any failure of timing or lost information. This is an improvement that does not normally impact the lighting network at the moment, but as more and more complex device endpoints are introduced to a network the advantage AVnu brings to the mechanics of the network will become not just a luxury, but necessary to maintain accuracy of the lighting system as a whole. 

For a lighting system it would mean that crispness and snap in device execution across the entire system would always exist.  That's the difference several hundred milliseconds down to a couple milliseconds would make.  It might not seem like much, and it might not seem worth it now, but if AVB is implemented the opportunity now exists for that latency, or other dropped information, to never happen.

Since the protocol will still pass through non-AVnu compliant switches until AVnu switches are introduced to the lan, there is no risk in introducing devices that are AVnu compliant in advance of the full network being AVnu compliant. The only loss would be that the precision timing of frame preemption that doesn't exist anyway on a non-AVnu network would be lost through the non-AVnu switches, in other words, the network traffic would behave as it does now, and Net3 and AVB can co-exist as more AVnu devices are added.

My belief is that as the lighting industry network traffic grows, it should grow from AVnu network roots so that it is locked into a protocol with superior mechanics.

ETC should lead the industry in implementing AVB, join the AVnu alliance and upgrade their existing devices to be AVnu compliant.

Eugene,

I believe that among all manufacturers they have been dealing with a constant pressure to upgrade to a new, a different, "better" protocol. Fortunately as we have seen through history of lighting technology protocol there were many in the beginning days but we have all seem to accept AMX then DMX as a whole. ETC and most manufacturers currently seem to be moving to sACN/ACN and RDM. I have seen a lot of these products but it is still very much a new thing for us despite the fact it has been in the works for more than ten years... 

I am glad you brought up AVB because I am new to it. I will enjoy looking up more information about it and I am sure many of our colleges will too.

Graciously,

Michael Dodge