Hamish Dumbreck from JESE recently attended the fifth Control Protocols Plug Fest held in Westlake, Texas. The event was well attended with more than 36 devices from 16 manufacturers being put through their paces.

Simon Newton of the open source project (OLA) attracted a lot of interest in the development of an RDM responder test suite, running tests on equipment at the event as well as drawing on the experience of those present to enhance the tests. Ryan Fletcher of ARRI joined the world of RDM, bringing a studio luminaire, demonstrating the wider industry interest in and application of RDM.

Matthias Hinrichs of Martin Professional and Peter Kirkup of Zero 88 used the opportunity to start work on a website to promote and provide information to users of RDM enabled equipment. The website will provide general information about the functionality of RDM along with a categorised list of manufacturers’ products.

Having gone through a steep learning curve at the meeting last October in Las Vegas, the Technical Standards Committee (TSC) working group for the proposed E1.33 standard made great progress during the course of the event, toward a draft version of the standard. The E1.33 is essentially a way of carrying RDM over Ethernet in the same way that the E1.31 carries DMX512 over Ethernet.

The draft version will be soon be available and ready for public review in July this year. The new standard will give additional benefit to fixtures that support RDM, bridging the gap between network controllers and the DMX512/RDM daisy chained fixtures.

With the main focus of technology being RDM control, improvements were made to JESE interfaces to act as responders as well as the GetSet controller application to handle protocol exceptions in a more robust and informative way, says Dumbreck.