PenSuite – User Manual V1.03
1.0 Introduction
Briefly the DM Pen products mission is record and carry easily:
“Design your show, record and bring with you”.
Why recording?
The first goal of a professional light programmer is to select a light desk and learn to use it in the best
way, because this means freedom of expression and productivity.
The DM Pen products range improve this concept taking care of recording what the light programmer realize whit his
preferred equipment.
Why carry?
Often the light programmer presence is not necessary during the show playback, so he can realize the
show and record it so the user has only the duty to activate his playback (i.e. fair booth, shop, club, etc.)
Moreover doing this with a normal light desk, mean carry heavy or expensive equipment that usually are not so
familiar to the users (i.e. barman, custodian, etc.).
This is another issue improved from the DM Pen products because contains only the show engine with a simple user
interface at a very low cost.
On the www.dmxpen.com web site, many brief documentation showing DM Pen products operation are provided that
we suggest to use.
2.0 DMX512 ed ArtNet
Many light desk systems are PC based and are responsible to edit the show and calculate the light value step frame
per frame in real time. Then is necessary to transmit this values to the fixtures using the DM 512 protocol. PC are not
provided with DM 512 ports, but in most case are provided with ethernet port, so to connect PC to fixture is
necessary a protocol conversion.
This concept can be applied also to many light desk that are equipped with ethernet port.
One of the most used protocol the transport DM 512 data over the ethernet line is the ArtNet protocol (Designed by
and Copyright Artistic Licence (UK) Ltd) also implemented on the DM Pen products that is from this side a complete
ArtNet Node
(device able to translate ArtNet protocol on DM 512 protocol and DM 512 protocol on ArtNet protocol).
The ethernet port availability on DM Pen products allow us to:
–extend DM universe
–develop a device network very easily (we can find on the market a lot of ethernet HUB, Switch or Access Point
allowing us to: make a WiFi ArtNet transmission, make a geographic node distribution, etc.)
–implement ArtNet on a light desk not provided with an ArtNet interface (on DM Pen we have a bidirectional
conversion so we can select DM ArtNet direction, connect the DM Pen products on a Light Desk DM Port→
OutPut and obtain an ArtNet line on his ethernet port)
–analyse a DM line from a PC
Following a breif explanations of some therm used in this document:
MAC Address:
48bit unique physical address number assigned to device by the producer.
IP Address:
32bit address number that identifies uniquely any nodes or servers in a network. In DM Pen products the
IP Address is assigned by the user. By default ArtNet protocol uses a Class A IP address scheme a 2 address group:
2.x.x.x for primary ArtNet address and 10.x.x.x for secondary ArtNet address.
Subnet Mask:
32bit address number that defines which part of the IP Address represents the network. By default all
ArtNet implementations require a Subnet Mask = 255.0.0.0. This means that the first byte of the IP Address,
represent the network address and the remaining three bytes represent the node address.
3 www.dmxpen.com
