Recommendations When Purchasing A Router?

Woland

Hello all,

I'm going to be buying a router in the near future to wire my laptop and show computer to so that I leave the show computer in the booth and control it remotely over a local area network. I'll also be including it in my kit to make LANs for master computer-slave computer setups.

Has anyone got suggests what to look for (or avoid) when one is getting a router for production purposes?

Best wishes,

Woland

Fred

@woland I have a pretty good linksys that I have been dragging around for years, but recently in my house I upgraded our wifi to a unify system. I would really check them out, they are small, POE and have great range. I have hired stuff from a rental company that also puts a standard trus grip on them so they can be mounted anywhere in a theatre. They do only have a single ethernet port so if you want to use an ethernet network as well you need a switch to go with it. It depends on your use case, but the unify stuff I have used gives me the best wifi, and it expands very nicely if you want to add other nodes for further reach. I picked up an 8 port POE switch so the whole setup is pretty easy and gives me ethernet as well.

Woland

@fred

Thanks for the info!

Just to clarify, POE is Power Over Ethernet, yes?

Best wishes,

Woland

Fred

Yes, POE is power over ethernet. This means with a POE router you can just connect the units with a single ethernet cable for power and data.

Woland

@fred

Great!

(Mostly just asking so folks who happen to find this thread in the future get all the info they need.)

Juriaan

Hi there,

A few things that are important :

Make sure that you buy a Router that can do both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Arduino stuff mainly can't do 5Ghz at times..
Buy a Router with a Gigabit switch. If you ever wish to connect your network to let's say a motioncapture set, then you need a Gigabit switch for fast data transfer. (Heavy OSC.. Hehehe)
Buy a router that has a great interface. Most of the time you need to use it when you are setting up your network. For example, you wish to give a static IP to your showcomputer so you are sure that when you unplug everthing and set it up at the next venue that it is just a matter of connecting the cables.
If you use the router only for performance work then create a network (hidden) with a simple password so that you can connect your devices on the fly.
HIDE YOUR NETWORK.. We don't want to broadcast something like 'Performance' as our SSID

Personally I have a Netgear NIGHTHAWK

Woland

@juriaan

Thanks for the info! Its great to collect all of this information in one place for forum users.

Best wishes,

Woland

Woland

Hello all,

For the sake of my own knowledge, and the benefit of future forum-users who run across this thread:

Further research has me asking the question, "Active or Passive POE?"

Anyone care to shed light on this? Active looks to be more common, so that is what I am leaning towards.

@Fred @Juriaan

I would love to know the make and model #'s of the routers that you mention if you have the time to check at some point.

Best wishes,

Woland

Juriaan

The thing with POE (Power over Ethernet) is that not a lot of devices support it. Personally I'm more for a switch that can deliver POE and just connect a Ethernet cable from my router to it.

Also I don't know a lot of routers that actually support 'POE' out of the box..

Juriaan

I have a Nighthawk R7000 btw and a few smaller ones that I use in installations. (40 bucks TPLINK)

Woland

I suppose I'm talking both switches (more common to have POE) and routers at this point

bonemap

@woland

I am just asking the question how POE would be useful for an Isadora installation? My only experience with POE is as an end user of a corporate telephone system. Other than that, I believe some video extenders and IOT systems use POE. Could it be useful for running micro controllers such as Arduino’s? Is it something that is going to become more common or needed?

Best wishes,

Bonemap

Juriaan

@bonemap

Hi there Bonemap,

I use a POE Switch for powering my motion capture camera's (https://optitrack.com/) and I have to say that in the industry I see a lot of small devices that can actually use POE (Camera's, Artnet Receivers, etc).

Ofcourse you can attach an arduino to a POE if you want too, the thing is that you need to make sure how much power is actually being send to your arduino, and convert it if necassary.

bonemap

@Juriaan

Ah OK, so these are specific purpose cameras that work in an array? I guess surveillance style systems would also use POE. I don’t see a lot of gear like that. But I can imagine it would be very useful to have plug and play networked devices with POE.

Thanks for your insight.

Best wishes

Bonemap

Juriaan

Exactly. Systems like surveillance camera's also use it. Basically most small networked devices have a version that is POE enabled.