Remote eyes on the rig: RDM, Stardust, LAN scan and the sACN monitor

Carrying universes across a WAN is half the job. The other half is knowing what is on the far end and being able to fix it without driving there. Every beam node sees its own DMX line and its own network, and the dashboard turns that into remote RDM, Stardust configuration, a LAN scan and a live sACN monitor.

RDM from the browser

The beam node's DMX port is a real RDM controller. From the node's Node/RDM tab you run a quick discovery (who is on the line) or a deep one (every parameter of every fixture), and each fixture opens into an editor: DMX address, personality, label, dimmer curve, plus an Advanced section that decodes every manufacturer-specific parameter the fixture announces — name, type, current value, editable. A fixture-template layer turns raw values into human labels, so a fan mode reads as Standard rather than 2.

All of this travels over the same WebSocket link as the universes, so it works identically whether the node is on the desk network or on 4G in a forest. Addressing a rig from a hotel room is a normal thing to do.

Drivers for the network nodes you already own

Most rigs have Art-Net/sACN-to-DMX nodes in them, and most of those have their own RDM controllers and web interfaces. BeamBridge talks to them directly: Obsidian Netron (EN4/EN12, per-port editors with 17 settings), Swisson XND (15 settings), and Showtec NET-2/5. The dashboard shows their ports, lets you change merge modes, universes and protocols, and pulls the RDM devices they discover into the same fixture list. We keep extending this line; the drivers are the part of BeamBridge that grows with every rig we meet.

Astera Stardust, without touching it

Astera's Stardust is the CRMX transmitter in a lot of film rigs. If one is on a beam node's network segment, the dashboard shows it on its own card — more than one if there are more — with its Art-Net/sACN configuration editable from the browser. The Stardust's built-in RDM controller (the Astera HYDRA and CRMX TimoTwo/TiMo devices it knows) is listed on that same card, the way the Stardust's own menu shows it. We reverse-engineered the unit's web-socket protocol for this because its Art-Net RDM implementation answers nothing; that is written down so nobody has to do it twice.

LAN scan: what is actually on the set network

A set network is never what the diagram says. One click on Scan LAN sweeps the node's local network with ICMP and TCP probes — so hosts that ignore ping still show up — reads the ARP table, and lists every device with IP, MAC and vendor, whether it took a DHCP lease from the node or was set by hand. A per-device port check tells you whether that box is a node, a console, a media server or somebody's laptop. The same list is on the node's little TFT screen for whoever is standing next to it.

The sACN monitor

Every beam listens to the whole sACN range (universes 1–63999) on its network and reports the sources it sees — console name, priority, universes, packets per second — live, on the dashboard. Open a universe and you see the value of every channel as it changes. It is the fastest answer to “is the desk actually sending U17?”, and it works around any beam, so a source problem in a truck is visible from the desk and the other way round. On one job a node was watching more than 500 universes from a media server without breaking a sweat.

Where this goes

The RDM side is being taken further: richer fixture templates, bulk operations across a whole line, and write access to the Stardust's fixture list. The direction is simple — everything a technician would walk to a node to do should be one click from wherever the desk is.