About sACN protocol

DMX is a standard widely used for controlling lighting elements in stage and building services applications. Beckhoff offers the EL6851 DMX master terminal and the EL6851-0010 DMX slave terminal for this purpose.

ESTA (Entertainment Services and Technology Association) developed Streaming Architecture for Control Networks (sACN) to enable the benefits of Ethernet to be utilized for DMX. sACN is recognized and published by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), therefore, the standard is named after ANSI with the number E1.31. sACN transfers DMX universe data via UDP/IP. The DMX data is embedded in the sACN frame as a complete universe and tunneled through UDP/IP. While earlier versions of Beckhoffs sACN example were defined by ANSI standard E1.31-2009, the current Tc3_sACN library is compliant with the latest ANSI E1.31 – 2018 standard (and also supporting E1.31-2009).

In addition to standard Data Packets (ST_SACN_DataPacket), the library provides support for specialized frame types introduced in the 2016 update and solidified in the 2018 standard:

• Synchronization Frame (ST_SACN_SyncPacket): This packet contains universe synchronization information used to trigger simultaneous updates across multiple devices, preventing visual artifacts in complex lighting setups.
• Universe Discovery Frame (ST_SACN_UniDiscoveryPacket): This packet contains a list of universes on which a source is actively operating. This allows monitoring devices to identify active universes on the network without having to join every multicast group.