Artistic Licence Previews eSense at PLASA London

	Artistic Licence's eSense

Artistic Licence will be previewing eSense, the first dedicated coordinator for RDM (Remote Device Management) at the forthcoming PLASA show at Excel, London, October 6-9, in stand L50.

eSense incorporates RDM monitoring, data storage, and sophisticated display functionality to unlock the potential of RDM for smart monitoring and automated maintenance applications.

According to the company, RDM is currently a hugely under-used resource -- using it to set fixture addresses is just the tip of the iceberg. It can be used for many other monitoring applications, such as reporting water ingress or determining which LEDs are non-functional in an array of thousands. While RDM is increasingly offered in lighting controllers, it is usually incorporated as a secondary function, which becomes very inefficient as channel count rises.

eSense solves this problem by offloading the RDM functionality to a dedicated machine, freeing up bandwidth (both hardware and human) at the lighting controller.

eSense captures RDM data from an Ethernet network using Art-Net, and stores the information in a SQL database for analysis and publication. Crucially, eSense not only harvests information, but also delivers it in various user-friendly formats. This could be a customized browser interface or, for example, an email that triggers when a multiple fault condition occurs.

For maximum versatility, eSense uses Art-Osc, the new Artistic Licence protocol, to display data on smartphones or tablets running an OSC app.

Artistic Licence CEO, Wayne Howell, comments: "The compatibility with OSC apps is a powerful feature that will prove a boon to engineers working on commissioning or maintenance tasks across large area sites, enabling instant smartphone access to fixture or sensor status information. eSense represents a sea-change in smart lighting control, facilitating self-monitoring systems that can flag potential problems before they cause damage, or respond quickly to fault conditions."

eSense will be available for shipping in the first quarter of 2014.