Help with ArtNet

Hi David,

do you route the "normal" network trafic also thru this NW adaptor (eg. to your router)?

I would recommend to use an own ethernet adaptor for each the artnet and the network traffic and at least as less switches on its way to the DMX interface.

Hi and welcome in our forum

I would recommend to install DMX-Workshop (https://artisticlicence.com/product/dmx-workshop/) With this tool, you can check your artnet configuration (see, if DMXControl 3 sends correctly, test your Artnet node,....) and try to find the problem.

Quote from DavidDenholm

I note that in other configurations there are options to configure the IP address of the Ethernet interface

DMXControl 3 works with the respective ethernet interface, detects your artnet nodes and send multicasts / broadcasts to all artnet nodes in the network. Thus you only have to select the IP address of the respective ethernet port of your pc.

Not fully related, but something to keep in mind:

I spent three days troubleshooting my artnet setup, loosing hair and maxing out blood pressure.... the setup worked like a charme, but when I decided to remove the wallwart power supply of my artnet node (showtec net2/3) and go PoE instead, all hell broke loose, random data being sent on the DMX bus, everything acting funny. Sniffing ethernet traffic via a span port didn´t give me a clear root cause, nor did sniffing on the DMX bus.

After trying almost anything, including isolating artnet traffic in a dedicated vlan, shortening the DMX chain, recabling and whatnot... turns out PoE is the troublemaker. Running other PoE devices from the same switch (Cisco 2960L) didn´t give me any issues, power consumption is also around 20% of the switch capability....

TLDR: Look in the most unlikely spots always take notes to pinpoint the issue. Temporarily simplify the setup as complexity is the natural enemy of troubleshooting.

Hope this helps, good luck!

That's an interesting finding. How long was the Ethernet Cable between the switch and the Net-2? Not that it should matter, I am just curious, because I used it in a PoE setup successfully.

Did you find a way to repeat the pattern? I am asking because since I discovered the flaw in the network stack, I have a contact at Highlight that I can report that kind of issues to and they try to take care.

There are some options I´d like to check, because, quite frankly, I´d prefer to go PoE as well :).

10m, Cat 6

Repeating the pattern is easy, just turn PoE on and off

trouble on : "power inline auto"

trouble off: "power inline never"

Could be everything between faulty hardware or "special" features on the switch side, maybe human error (config options I never had to use before with other PoE devices), maybe some hickup on the node side or just a mismatch between two interpretations of a protocol to detect class, dunno.

I can check a different port, switch and cable and node (since I just bought a second net-2/3). But now that things work again, I´m a bit busy getting my head around DMXC - just want to drill down and see whether it´s worth the effort to switch my DMX software, because that would involve rewriting something near 1500 scenes.

Give me a little time, I´ll come back to this. Since I will learn a bit more of the inner workings of PoE I´m actually interested beyond "hey it works again, next topic please".