KiNET

showstack / protocols / kinet

Also called Color Kinetics Ethernet Protocol, Philips KiNET.

Color Kinetics' lightweight UDP protocol for sending light data to their power/data supplies and luminaires over ethernet. If a job has Color Kinetics fixtures on PDS supplies, this is usually what is actually on the wire between the controller and the rig.

Lighting controlProprietary, documentedSignifyReported

Stewarded by Signify (Philips Color Kinetics).

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 →

Ports

udp/6038 Light data (DMXOUT v1 and PORTOUT v2 packets)
Color Kinetics also document 6039, 6041 and 6045 for non-light-data traffic such as keypad triggering.

Addressing

512 slots per packet. v1 DMXOUT sends one universe to a supply, which splits it across ports by stored node counts. v2 PORTOUT adds a port field so each output port gets its own universe.

What goes wrong

v1 DMXOUT relies on node counts stored inside the power/data supply to decide where one universe splits across its ports. Change the fixture count and the split is wrong until the supply is reconfigured, not the console.

v2 PORTOUT addresses each output port directly. A controller sending v1 to a supply set up for v2, or the reverse, gives you either nothing or the right data on the wrong ports.

Light data is unicast to a specific supply IP and there is no discovery a third-party controller can lean on. Every supply address has to be recorded, labelled and kept with the show file.

Port 6038 carries light data only. Keypads and other station traffic use 6039, 6041 and 6045, so a firewall rule that opens 6038 alone passes pixels and breaks wall panels.

This is a vendor protocol on a vendor ecosystem. Third-party support is an add-on written against a whitepaper, so verify against the actual supply firmware on site rather than trusting a feature list.

What speaks KiNET (5)

Product	Direction	Notes
disguise Designer disguise	out	KiNET v1 and v2 are listed as DMX device drivers.
DMX-Workshop Singularity (UK) Ltd	bidirectional
Hippotizer Green Hippo (an ACT Entertainment brand)	out	KiNET is one of the PixelMapper output protocols, alongside Art-Net and sACN.
OLA (Open Lighting Architecture) Open Lighting Project	out
Luminex LumiNode 12 Luminex Network Intelligence	bidirectional	KiNET output for Color Kinetics fixtures.

Open source implementations

OLA (Open Lighting Architecture) — C++, LGPL-2.1-or-later

Typical use

Console or media server driving Color Kinetics power/data supplies
Architectural pixel installations built on Color Kinetics hardware
Converters bridging an sACN or Art-Net show network to a PDS
Keypad and station control alongside light data on the same supply

Sources

KiNET Ethernet Protocol Whitepaper (port 6038, DMXOUT v1 and PORTOUT v2) — Color Kinetics (Signify) primary
KiNET — Open Lighting Project wiki (packet header, UDP 6038) — Open Lighting Project
OLA KiNET plugin source (SendDMX and SendPortOut, 16-port PORTOUT limit) — Open Lighting Project

Understand the mechanism

DMX on the wire Show networks

Something wrong, or missing?

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

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