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Titan Tricks
sACN Unicast
The idea for this is from a post in the Facebook group:
Has anyone successfully controlled the Mission Ballroom disco ball with an Avo? Need to unicast sACN to the nodes but can’t find a way to do that.
sACN - or Streaming ACN - is usually used as multicast protocol: the console sends it to a network switch with a special header so that the switch can define groups, one per universe. Nodes and fixtures in turn announce to the switch which universe(s) they need – they subscribe to the respective group. The switch then makes sure that each node/fixture receives the data they want, and are not receiving data they do not want. This reduces network traffic and computing load. This mechanism is called Multicast.
There is a fallback mechanism in place if some details are missing. In that case the switch defaults to forwarding all sACN data to all nodes/fixtures which requires much more bandwith and strains the network interfaces but makes sure that all participants have a chance to get their data. This is called Broadcast.
However it looks like there are fixtures in the market which do not support this mechanism but require Unicast: they only work with data explicitely sent to them.
(Please excuse this very simplistic explanation. I greatly encourage you to read more on this, and there are plenty of websites dedicated to introducing you to network computing. But for the purpose of this article this might suffice.)