DALI

showstack / protocols / dali

Also called Digital Addressable Lighting Interface.

An IEC-standardized two-wire digital protocol for addressing and dimming individual architectural/house lighting ballasts and LED drivers, relevant wherever building/house lighting (rather than stage rigs) needs to integrate with a show's control system.

Lighting controlPaid specDALI AllianceVerified

Stewarded by DALI Alliance (DiiA).

Control Small, urgent, must arrive

Small messages that either repeat constantly or fire once. Bandwidth is almost never the problem.

What kills it. Latency and loss on the messages that fire once. A repeating level survives a dropped packet; a GO does not.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

What goes wrong

Only 64 addressable control-gear devices per DALI line, far smaller than DMX512's 512 addresses, so large venues need many lines/gateways.

Slow control-data rate (1200 bit/s, Manchester-encoded) makes DALI unsuitable for fast theatrical chases - it's built for static/architectural dimming, not show cueing.

DALI-2 certification (introduced 2017) is needed for reliable multi-vendor interoperability; pre-DALI-2 gear can behave unpredictably when mixed across brands.

Sources

Understand the mechanism

DMX on the wire Show networks

Something wrong, or missing?

Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, first_published, implementations. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.

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