Ping an artnet device ....

Howdy,

Whats the best DAT to use to ping/pong a local artnet device and/or computer,
both on a local network?

thanks
puck

The Art-Net DAT will query devices on the network. If it’s missing something you need please let us know.

I don’t even know if it’s possible to replicate such functionality, but when configuring my artnet device the NMU utility is invaluable.
enttec.com/index.php?main_me … s&pn=79001

Hey,

unfortunately for programming you will always have to rely on the makers supplied software. From my experience most Enttecs nowadays come with a web based config util?

Cheers
Markus

Great thanks Malcolm … Completely missed the ArtnetDAT.
However I’m having issues receiving any poll reply from my artnet nodes,
They are connected and polling fine from the software from the the manufacturer
(dmxking.com) but I im not getting any reply from ArtnetDAT. I’m selecting the ‘artnet1_callbacks’ scrript in the ‘callbacks_DAT’ parameter and hitting ‘poll’ …

What im trying achieve is to see what artnet devices are present on the network
by identifying them by ip address.

Is there something im missing?

thanks

puck.

Hi Puck,

can you try in Wireshark to see if the polling from the device software is an acutal Artnet Poll message?

cheers
Markus

Hello,
bumping up this topic, because I try to Artnet Poll the NetSERVO device by Smart Show
with the ArtNet DAT. In the manual of said device, it is pretty clear that it can be polled,
however the artnetDAT doesnt seem to see it:
https://smartshow.lighting/netservo/

I have the device directly connected to my
computer (win10, 64), no routers and switches involved.

I have the ArtNetminator running, which sees the SmartShow
and so does DMX Workshop, so I know Artnet poll works in two other softwares.

https://artisticlicence.com/product/dmx-workshop/

Any ideas why TD refuses to see the SmartShow?
Is it maybe buggy?

And another question: I read that Artnet can be Broadcast OR Unicast
however in TD I don’t find a hint which one is used, nor the option to set it.
What is TD using?

Thank you,
best
Stefan

Just to get the obvious out of the way: I’m assuming you have your Firewall off for private and public networks - or whichever it shows up as on the Windows Network and Sharing Center when you plug in? If you’re seeing it in ArtNetominator and DMX Workshop, probably, but also those programs might be smarter about adding their own firewall exceptions than TD is (since they’re such specific software)

It might be that ArtNetominator or DMX Workshop have monopolized the Art-Net port, so maybe try starting up only TouchDesigner after the network is plugged in and showing as active in Windows. (Without having started up other ArtNet programs first)

From there, the “Local Address” parameter of the ArtNet DAT is how you would tell it which network adapter to use for polling. Assuming you have only one, it shouldn’t matter, but it couldn’t hurt to select the IP of your local adapter to make sure it’s paying attention to the correct adapter.

From there, if the IP address of the NetSERVO you see in DMX Workshop / ArtNetominator is in the same subnet range as your computer’s IP, and you have selected said computer IP in the “Local Address” par of the ArtNet DAT, then it should be working. You can’t “unicast” discovery packets. The unicast they’re talking about in the NetSERVO manual is referring to unicasting the DMX data stream packets. Discovery is broadcast to the broadcast address of whatever network you’re attached to, so if it’s 192.168.1.? then broadcast is sent to 192.168.1.255.

If it’s STILL not working, it might be that either the NetSERVO or TouchDesigner is not following the spec of ArtNet discovery packets (called ArtPoll and ArtPollReply), so you would have to use wireshark to sniff the packets coming in and out of TD, ArtNetominator, DMX Workshop and your NetSERVO device to see where the issue lies (is TD sending a poll packet and the device never responds? is the device responding but TD never registers it? are the packets on the same port? etc) It could be that ArtNetominator and DMX Workshop are mor fogiving of out-of-spec packets, or it could be that TouchDesigner is not following the spec.

If someone wants to send me an ArtSERVO, I’d be glad to investigate it myself if you’re not familiar with WireShark :slight_smile:

Hey Peet,

thank you for these tipps! After having a wireshark session (thank you for your help, Markus), it seems that NetServo is doing the right thing, but TD might be not having the same idea of an ArtNet Polly Reply.

My main issue was to figure out, how I make sure the NetServo devices receive only the data they need as they were overpowered listening to all the other data on the ArtNet network.

I didn’t understand, that you can use several DMX out nodes and
have them send their data to a specific IPs, which are set in “Network Adress” on the Network page of the DMX Out CHOP. The default of 255.255.255.255 broadcasts to all devices on the same network, and they need to look at all of that to figure out which universe they should listen too.
If you enter a sepcific IP it becomes unicast - which is not too well explained in the help, but let’s you send only the relevant universe to the device, thus reducing the data it has to look at drastically.

It makes total sense, what you say that the poll has to be broadcast, however the poll wasn’t my real issue, I just though it would be necessary to solve my issues (which it isn’t :slight_smile:

Overall, with the knowledge of today I would have chosen sACN, which seems to be better equipped
to adress individual devices.

Best
Stefan

Yeah it’s definitely a little confusing, and it doesn’t help that the DMX Out CHOP has been changing regularly over the years (we used to have to send sACN by manually constructing packets with a UDP out DAT) but most of the “documentation” about networking for ArtNet vs sACN and things like the difference between broadcast, multicast and unicast packets is just knowing about TCP/IP networking in general - which is such a HUGE and loaded topic, that I would imagine trying to delve too far into it on Derivative’s help pages might be a slippery slope, especially considering all of the other OPs that use some form of networking and could each their own contain a novel of information about how to properly implement all of the setup outside of TouchDesigner.

Using 255.255.255.255 for broadcast and specific addresses for unicast is not just a TouchDesigner thing; that is a core part of TCP/IP networking that I don’t think many people realize. Not to mention things like old-style “classfull” IP addressing and the resulting private IP address ranges, subnetting, multicast ranges, ARP tables, etc… half of which I don’t really understand and all of which I have heard so many opinions on which is better and when / why to use what that a whole page of the TD wiki wouldn’t even begin to cover it all.

That being said, one thing that is NOT in the documentation (that definitely should be) is a little “hack” that will help a lot in your situation: If you add another column to the end of the “Routing Table DAT” labelled “netaddress”, you can put a different IP address in each line, and that universe will be sent to that IP address (including the various levels of broadcast all the way up to full broadcast)

image

This also works in the DMX In CHOP, though confusingly the column just needs to be labelled “address” which is going to confuse lighting people (it got me at first) since address usually means “DMX address” and not “Network IP address”.

As far as sACN vs ArtNet, the benefit (especially for networks with lots of devices on them) to sACN is definitely the MultiCast ability, which would take care of “unicasting” the data to the needed devices for you, but be aware that it requires new enough network switches that can do IGMP snooping and properly populate their ARP tables. If anything fails in that area, it reverts to broadcast and you’re back where you started. I’ve gotten in the habit of just manually unicasting everything myself to remove as many variables from the equasion as possible.

The other benefit to sACN is the priority tags built into the headers which allow for easy implementation of a live and backup system with instant fail-overs (as long as you don’t saturate the network). Otherwise, ArtNet does have the discovery system already built in TouchDesigner, and the ability to use ArtSync to keep dense LED displays from glitching, but other than that, both can usually do the same job interchangeable, and at that point it just becomes a matter of what your DMX devices will actually listen to as some older stuff will ONLY do ArtNet and sometimes only in certain IP address ranges.

If you would be willing to save and send me the WireShark trace from your devices sending ArtPollReply packets, I would be interested in disecting it, maybe even getting something to put in a bug report so that Derivative can fix it in a future release. Otherwise good luck and feel free to post here if you have any more questions.

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I thought i was going crazy when there was no column labeled address in the dmxOutCHOP and nothing about something like that in the docs. But i was super sure that it was possible. Thanks for the headsup on netaddress