Artistic Licence Previews nanoScope at PLASA London 2013

	Artistic Licence's nanoScope

Artistic Licence announces nanoScope, a pocket-sized, battery-powered tester for DMX512 and RDM. The product will be previewed at the forthcoming PLASA London show at Excel London in stand L50, October 6 - 9, 2013.

nanoScope is built into a five-pin XLR connector and indicates results using color-coded light, using a plastic lens to give 360-degree viewing.

Conventional wisdom holds that test equipment should have a GUI of some sort. While that clearly has its place, a simple chromatic display provides rapid feedback that is both hands-free and visible at a distance or in awkward positions -- such as hanging from a truss. nanoScope uses cold colors to indicate "good" signals and hot colors to indicate "bad" or unusual data (as detailed below), allowing the product to be used intuitively.

Two modes of operation exist, selected by a recessed slide switch that also controls power on/off.

In Pixel Mode, nanoScope displays the first three DMX channels as an RGB mix, to provide confidence that the expected data is on the cable.

In Analyse Mode, nanoScope displays one long blip (green or red to indicate good or bad data respectively), then a train of short colored blips representing different attributes of the DMX512 signal:
• Orange: Break Length out of range, less than 88 µS (an error)
• Magenta: Mark After Break (MaB) less than 8 µS (an error)
• Yellow: Incorrect number of stop bits (an error)
• Red: RDM data format wrong (an error)
• Pink: Packet too long, contains more than 512 channels (an error)
• Cyan: Less than 512 channels in data (informational)
• Blue: RDM Discovery occurring (usually informational but can be an error)
• White: Non-Zero Start Codes (excluding RDM) detected (usually informational but can be an error)
• Green: RDM detected in data (informational)
• Lime: RDM draft detected in data (informational)

When no data is detected, nanoScope blips white every five seconds to conserve power.

The company says, by introducing a low-cost, sophisticated yet intuitive tester to the market, nanoScope ensures that every technician can afford to have a tester in their pocket.