The 2015 Ilda conference brought us something else than awards for laserists: the new IDN standard!
http://www.laserist.org/StandardsDoc...eam_rev001.pdf
It's designed to be a way to stream laser art over digital standards such as ethernet. In that way the old analog ilda cable and connector can be deprecated in favor of ethernet controllers on stage or better, inside the projector directly. It also means OS-specific USB drivers can now go in the trash can where they belong.
After a first glance over the document, here are some of my findings:
- Signals are now split over things called channels, I believe there can be 64 channels simultaneously
- Rather than specifying which channel does what like with the analog standard (eg pin 1 is X+, pin 2 is Y+ etc) channel assignment is now fully flexible and should be agreed on between the "producer" (the laser program) and the "consumer" (the control board).
- This allows for a uniform way to handle multiple projector setups, no channels are wasted on projectors that only have a green module and there is no longer a limitation on the amount of colours in a projector
- You can also send DMX512 signals over it in the same way as a laser channel
- Same for static effects like bounce mirrors and gratings and such
- There's a distinction between continous point stream (like an analog module) and per-frame streaming
- There is no dedicated shutter channel anymore, the shutter is supposed to go down when no signal is received automatically
- There does not appear to be a way for the consumer to send status signals back to the laser program. It would probably cause too much headache to implement this on every DAC but things like interlock status, temperature, maybe even scanner feedback signal for advanced auto-tuning algorithms would be very neat if they could get sent back to the computer
- somebody at Ilda has difficulties discerning its and it's
The only thing to hope for now is that the big manufacturers implement this, if not as the standard way to send things then at least as an option. I'm of course looking at that one manufacturer that is currently persuading every Chinese manufacturer out there to equip their projectors with their new ethernet controller.
It should now also be possible to send laser data from one program to another seamlessly.
Whaddy'all think?