Botex NETcon 8-5

I purchased this to act as a sort of firewall between my MA desk and a festival lighting rig when network IP address conflicts would prevent me from just connecting my network directly to theirs, or when my touring package overlaps the sACN universes at a festival. My intent was to send 5-pin DMX directly from my MA console into the node, and then outputting sACN from the node to connect to the festival rig on whatever IP address and sACN range they wanted. Simple enough.

The device is able to do this with ArtNet. The interface is a bit clunky, and several things are not well explained in the manual (why there are "in" and "out" network ports... what's an "in" or "out" network port, anyway?). But after just a few minutes of hunting through the menu I was able to make my scheme work over ArtNet.

The problem is that it doesn't work with sACN, despite claims to the contrary in the manual. I spent several hours experimenting with the device and could never get it to work, using two different sACN monitoring apps to sniff the network, as well as an MA console itself. There's no indication that it ever generated any sACN data. Furthermore, there is an option to disable the ArtNet functions, but even after "disabling" ArtNet (and even power cycling the unit just to be sure) the device would still convert 5-pin DMX inputs into ArtNet data. The "disable ArtNet" menu item didn't do anything at all.

I sent a request to Thomann tech support but never received an answer. After sending a second request for help I heard back that perhaps the unit was defective and needed to be returned to Germany for a firmware upgrade...which is problematic since I am in the USA. But why can't they just send me the firmware to perform an upgrade myself via the USB port? I emailed that exact question but days later I have not received a reply.

Sometimes it's worth paying more for the name brand. I'll buy Swisson next time instead.