sACN, RDM, EOS, Hog - Why don´t they like each other?

Dear ETC People.

I´d like to confirm / understand something. In our venue we´re running EOS streaming ACN to response gateways.
This week we have someone with a Hog4PC within our venue and he´s streaming ACN as well to control stuff.
For licensing he has two hoglets for 8 Universes summary and we´re basically arranging control by priorities.
Everything was good so far but at some point he wasn´t able to control stuff he should have.
Strange thing was that the sACN-Viewer showed him controlling the address but the device didn´t react.
EOS on the other hand didn´t change values in the sACN-Viewer as it had a lower priority but here the device reacted anyway.
We reseted the gateway that was putting out DMX and were fine.
Today we had the same problem on a universe where Hog and EOS have the same priority as there are dimmers only and checked with a DMX tester on the gateway and saw that it wasn´t outputting the hog ACN values.
Then we noticed that those two gateways had RDM activated for at least one port. We had networking troubles with one of them before when RDM was activated but an update to the most recent firmware fixed it.
Now we deactivated RDM for all gateways, rebooted the one giving us trouble and arer fine for the moment.
I hope we will be from now on.
Can anyone confirm if that is a known issue or if there is anything else I´m missing?
HogPC is 3.15, EOS is 3.0.1 and the response gateways are on the most recent firmware.

TIA

Paule

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  • Hi there,

    did the setup worked in the end? And did you edited something?

    An other question to : Do you think that the Per-Channel Priority could intervene in a setting like that?

    I know that Hog4 can toggle Per-Channel Priority on and of. But i never checked it.

    Maybe i give it a try some day.

    Maybe   can again tell the detailed priority settings that where made.

  • Eos has per-address (per-channel) priority always on. Hog 4 can enable/disable/adjust priorities as a setting in the console setup but it is off by default. It is possible that the combination of per-address and per-universe settings were interacting negatively, but the bigger issue is likely the flood of traffic going everywhere on the network as broadcast without IGMP snooping enabled.

    ArtNet is a broadcast protocol so it will send out data and everyone on the network gets it and then decides to do something with it or drop the packet. sACN is a multicast protocol so that only those who are interested in the specific universes will get the data if the switch has IGMP snooping enabled to know which end-devices are interested in which universes. Without that enabled, again every device will get all of the universes of information and it will be up to the end device to determine if it is interested in that data or not.

    Receiving packets of information that you aren't interested in requires processing time and power to determine what it is and that you're not interested which can negatively affect response and operations if there is more time spent ignoring packets than using them.

  • So in that case, while having ArtNet and sACN on the same Network, it could (but may wouldn't) be draining more Traffic and Ressources because of ArtNet most likely is Broadcast?

  • Yes, depending on how much traffic is there and any other settings in the switch, it is possible that a large amount of ArtNet could affect devices in the same subnet, even with IGMP snooping enabled so they are only getting the sACN they are interested in. It's all about balance.

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